The voluntaryist creed; being the Herbert Spencer lecture delivered at Oxford June 7, 1906; and A plea for voluntaryism

THE

VOLUNTARYIST CREED

BEING THE HERBERT SPENCER LECTURE
DELIVERED AT OXFORD, JUNE 7, 1906

AND

A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM

BY

AUBERON HERBERT

PRINTED FOR W. J. SIMPSON

AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON : HENRY FROWDE

AMEN CORNER E.G.

1908

HENRY FROWDE, M.A.

PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

LONDON, EDINBURGH
NEW YORK AND TORONTO

THE first of the two papers which this book contains is
the Herbert Spencer Lecture delivered by Mr. Auberon
Herbert in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford on June 7,
1906. Permission has very kindly been given by the
University Authorities to publish it here for the first
time.

The second paper was only completed by Mr. Herbert
a few days before his death in November, 1906. He had
intended to circulate this summary of the Voluntaryist
Creed for signature by those who agreed with it.

MR. SPENCER AND THE
GREAT MACHINE

I

I BEGAN my lecture at Oxford by expressing my sense
of the debt that we owed to Mr. Spencer for his splen
did attempt to show us the great meanings that underlie
all things — the order, the intelligibility, the coherence,
that exist in this world of ours. I confessed that, on
some great points of his philosophy, I differed from his
teaching, parting, so to speak, at right angles from him ;
but that difference did not alter my view of how much
he had helped us in the clear bold way in which he had
traced the great principles running through the like and
unlike things of our world ; and in which with so skilful
a hand he had grouped the facts round those principles,
that he always followed — might I say — with the keen
instinct of a hound that follows the scent of the prey in
front of him. Time, I thought, might take away much,
and might add much ; but the effort to unite all parts of
the great whole, to bind and connect them all together,
would remain as a splendid monument of what one man,
treading a path of his own, could achieve.

But to-day we are only concerned with his social and
political teaching, where we may, I think, follow his
leading with more reliance, and with but little reserve.
I have often laughed and said that, as far as I myself
was concerned, he spoilt my political life. I went into
the House of Commons, as a young man, believing that

6 MR. SPENCER AND

we might do much for the people by a bolder and more
unsparing use of the powers that belonged to the great
law-making machine ; and great, as it then seemed to
me, were those still unexhausted resources of united
national action on behalf of the common welfare. It
was at that moment that I had the privilege of meeting
Mr. Spencer, and the talk which we had — a talk that
will always remain very memorable to me — set me
busily to work to study his writings. As I read and
thought over what he taught, a new window was opened
in my mind. I lost my faith in the great machine ; I
saw that thinking and acting for others had always
hindered not helped the real progress ; that all forms of
compulsion deadened the living forces in a nation ; that
every evil violently stamped out still persisted, almost
always in a worse form, when driven out of sight, and
festered under the surface. I no longer believed that
the handful of us — however well-intentioned we might
be — spending our nights in the House, could manufac
ture the life of a nation, could endow it out of hand with
happiness, wisdom and prosperity, and clothe it in all
the virtues. I began to see that we were only playing
with an imaginary magician's wand ; that the ambitious
work we were trying to do lay far out of the reach of
our hands, far, far, above the small measure of our
strength. It was a work that could only be done in one
way— not by gifts and doles of public money, not by
making that most corrupting and demoralizing of all
things, a common purse ; not by restraints and compul
sions of each other ; not by seeking to move in a mass,
obedient to the strongest forces of the moment, but by
acting through the living energies of the free individuals
left free to combine in their own way, in their own
groups, finding their own experience, setting before

THE GREAT MACHINE 7

themselves their own hopes and desires, aiming only at
such ends as they truly shared in common, and ever as
the foundation of it all, respecting deeply and religious
ly alike their own freedom, and the freedom of all others.
And if it was not in our power, — we excellent and
worthy people,— fighting our nightly battle of words,
with our half-light, our patchwork of knowledge, and
our party passions, often swayed, in a great measure
unconsciously, by our own interests, half autocrats, half
puppets, if it was not given to us to create progress, in
any true sense of the word, and to present it to the
nation, ready-made, fresh from our ever busy anvil,
much in the fashion that kind-hearted nurses hand out
cake and jam to expectant children ; if all this taking of
a nation's life out of its own hands into our hands was
but a bewildered dream, a careless conceit on our part,
might it not, on the other hand, be only too easily in our
power to mislead and to injure, to hinder and destroy the
voluntary self-helping efforts and experiments that were
beyond all price, to depress the great qualities, to soften
and break down the national fibre, and in the end, as we
flung our gifts broadcast, to turn the whole people into
two or three reckless quarrelling crowds, that had lost
all confidence in their own qualities and resources, that
were content to remain dependent on what others did
for them — ever disappointed, ever discontented, because
the natural and healthy field of their own energies had
been closed to them, and all that they now had to do
was to clamour as loudly as possible for each new thing
that their favourite speakers hung in glittering phrases
before their eyes ? I saw that no guiding, no limiting or
moderating principle existed in the competition of poli
tician against politician ; but that almost all hearts were
filled with the old corrupting desire, that had so long

8 MR. SPENCER AND

haunted the world for its ceaseless sorrow, to possess
that evil mocking gift of power, and to use it in their own
imagined interest — without question, without scruple —
over their fellow men. From that day I gave myself to
preaching, in my own small way, the saving doctrine of
liberty, of self-ownership and self-guidance, and of resist
ing that lust for power, which had brought such count
less sufferings and misfortunes on all races in the past,
and which still, to-day, turns the men and women of the
same country, who should be as friends and close allies,
if the word ' country ' has any meaning, into two hostile
armies, ever wastefully, uselessly, and to the destruction
of their own happiness and prosperity, striving against
each other, always dreading, often hating, those whom
the fortunes of war may at any moment make their
masters. Was it for this — this bitter, reckless and
rather sordid warfare — I tried to ask — that we were
leading this wonderful earth-life ; was this the true end,
the true fulfilment of all the great qualities and nobler
ambitions that belonged to our nature ?

Now, whether you judge that I acted rightly or
wrongly in thus yielding myself to Mr. Spencer's
influence, you will not, I think, quarrel very seriously
with me, if I say that between Mr. Spencer's mind and
the mind of the politician there lies the deepest of all
gulfs ; and that there is no region of human thought
which is so disorderly, so confused, so lawless, so little
under the rule of the great principles, as the region of
political thought. It must be so, because that disorder
and confusion are the inevitable consequence and
penalty of the strife for power. You cannot serve two
masters. You cannot devote yourself to the winning of
power, and remain faithful to the great principles.
The great principles, and the tactics of the political

THE GREAT MACHINE 9

campaign, can never be made one, never be reconciled.
In that region of mental and moral disorder, which we
call political life, men must shape their thoughts and
actions according to the circumstances of the hour, and
in obedience to the tyrant necessity of defeating their
rivals. When you strive for power, you may form
a temporary, fleeting alliance with the great principles,
if they happen to serve your purpose of the moment,
but the hour soon comes, as the great conflict enters
a new phase, when they will not only cease to be
serviceable to you, but are likely to prove highly
inconvenient and embarrassing. If you really mean to
have and to hold power, you must sit lightly in your
saddle, and make and remake your principles with the
needs of each new day ; for you are as much under the
necessity of pleasing and attracting, as those who gain
their livelihood in the street. We all know that the
course which our politicians of both parties will take,
even in the near future, the wisest man cannot foresee.
We all know that it will probably be a zig-zag course ;
that it will have ' sharp curves ', that it may be in self-
evident contradiction to its own past; that although
there are many honourable and high-minded men in both
parties, the interest of the party, as a party, ever tends
to be the supreme influence, overriding the scruples
of the truer-judging, the wiser and more careful. Why
must it be so, as things are to-day? Because this
conflict for power over each other is altogether different
in its nature to all other — more or less useful and
stimulating — conflicts in which we engage in daily life.
As soon as we place unlimited power in the hands of
those who govern, the conflict which decides who is to
possess the absolute sovereignty over us involves our
deepest interests, involves all our rights over ourselves,

io MR. SPENCER AND

all our relations to each other, all that we most deeply
cherish, all that we have, all that we are in ourselves.
It is a conflict of such supreme fateful importance, as
we shall presently see in more detail, that once engaged
in it we must win, whatever the cost ; and we can
hardly suffer anything, however great or good in itself,
to stand between us and victory. In that conflict
affecting all the supreme issues of life, neither you nor
I, if we are on different sides, can afford to be beaten.
Think carefully what this conflict and what the posses
sion of unlimited power in plainest matter of fact
means. If I win, I can deal with you and yours as
I please ; you are my creature, my subject for experi
ment, my plastic material, to which I shall give any
shape that I please ; if you win, you in the same way
can deal with me and mine, just as you please ; I am
your political plaything, 'your chattel, your anything/
Ought we to wonder that, with so vast a stake flung
down on the table, even good men forget and disregard
all the restraints of their higher nature, and in the
excitement of the great game become utterly un
scrupulous ? There are grim stories of men who have
staked body and soul in the madness of their play ; are
we after all so much unlike them — we gamesters of
the political table— staking all rights, all liberties, and
the very ownership of ourselves? And what results,
what must result from our consenting to enter into this
reckless soul-destroying conflict for power over each
other? Will there not necessarily be the ever-present,
the haunting, the maddening dread of how I shall deal
with you if I win ; and how you will deal with me if
you win? That dread of each other, vague and un
defined, yet very real, is perhaps the worst of all the
counsellors that men can admit to their hearts. A man

THE GREAT MACHINE n

who fears, no longer guides and controls himself; right
and wrong become shadowy and indifferent to him ;
the grim phantom drives, and he betakes himself to the
path — whatever it is — that seems to offer the best
chance of safety. We see the same vague dread
acting upon the nations. At times you may have an
aggressive and ambitious Government, planning a world-
policy for its own aggrandizement, that endangers the
peace of all other nations ; but in most cases it is the
vague dread of what some other rival nation will do
with its power that slowly leads up to those disastrous
and desolating international conflicts. So it is with our
political parties. We live dreading each other, and
become the reckless slaves of that dread, losing
conscience, losing guidance and definite purpose, in
our desperate effort to escape from falling under the
subjection of those whose thoughts and beliefs and
aims are all opposed to our own. True it is that the
leaders of a party may have their own higher desires,
their own personal sense of right, but it is a higher
desire and sense of right which they must often with
a sigh — or without a sigh — put away into their pockets,
bowing themselves before the ever present necessity
of winning the conflict and saving their own party from
defeat. The stake is too great to allow room for
scruples, or the more delicate balancings of what is right
and wrong in itself. We all know — ' Need must, when
the devil drives/ ' Skin for a skin, what will a man not
do for his skin/

Now let us look how that winning of the political
battle has to be done? Winning means securing for
our side the larger crowd ; and that can only be done,
as we know in our hearts, though we don't always put
it into words, by clever baiting of the hook which is to

12 MR. SPENCER AND

catch the fish. It is of little use throwing the bare hook
into the salmon pool; you must have the colours
brightly and artistically blended — the colours that suit
the particular pool, the state of the water, the state of
the weather. Unless you are learned in the fisherman's
art, it is but few fish you will carry home in your
basket. So in the political pool you must skilfully
combine all the glittering attractions that you have to
offer; you must appeal to all the different special
interests, using the well chosen lure for each. It is
true that there may be exceptional moments with all
nations when the political arts lose much of their
importance, when some great matter rises above special
interests, and the people also rise above themselves.
But that is human nature at its best ; and not the
human nature as we have to deal with it on most days
of the week. It is also true that the best men in every
party stoop unwillingly; but, as I have said, they are
not their own masters; they are acting under forces
which decide for them the course they must follow, and
reduce to silence the voice within them. They have
gone in for the winning of power, and those who play
for that stake must accept the conditions of the game.
You can't make resolutions — it is said — with rose-water ;
and you can't play at politics, and at the same time
listen to what your soul has to say in the matter. The
soul of a high-minded man is one thing ; and the great
game of politics is another thing. You are now part of
a machine with a purpose of its own — not the purpose
of serving the fixed and supreme principles — the great
game laughs at all things that stand before and above
itself, and brushes them scornfully aside, but the purpose
of securing victory; and to that purpose all the more
scrupulous men must conform, like the weaker brethren,

THE GREAT MACHINE 13

or — as the noblest men do occasionally — stand aside.
As our system works, it is the party interests that rule
and compel us to do their bidding. It must be so ; for
without unity in the party there is no victory, and
without victory no power to be enjoyed. When once
we have taken our place in the great game, all choice
as regards ourselves is at an end. We must win ;
and we must do the things which mean winning, even
if those things are not very beautiful in themselves.
And what is it that we have to do ? In plain words—
and plainness of thought, directness of speech, is the
only wholesome course— we must buy the larger half of
the nation; and buying the nation means setting up
before all the various groups, of which it is composed,
the supreme object, the idol of their own special interests.
We must offer something that makes it worth while for
each group to give us their support, and that something
must be more than our rivals offer. Put your own self-
interests in the first place, and see that you get them —
is the watchword of all politics — though we don't often
express it in those crude and unashamed terms. Politi
cal art has, like many another accomplishment, its own
refinements for half veiling the real meanings. If we
wish to do our work in the finer fashion, in the artist's
way, we must use the light and skilful hand ; we must
mix in the attractive phrases, appeal to patriotic motives,
borrow — a little cautiously — such assistance as we can
from the great principles— a slight passing bow that
does not too deeply commit us to their acquaintance as
regards the future — and throw dexterously over it all —
as a clever cook introduces into her dishes her choicest
seasoning— a flavour of noble and disinterested purpose.
It is a fine art of its own, to buy, and at the same time
to gild and beautify the buying ; to get the voter into

i4 MR. SPENCER AND

the net, and at the same time to inspire him with the
happy consciousness that, whilst he is getting what he
wants, he is through it all the devoted patriot, serving
the great interests of his country. And then also you
must study and understand human nature; you must
play — as the skilled musician plays on his instrument —
on all the strings — both the higher and lower — of that
nature ; you must utilize all ambitions, desires, pre
judices, passions and hatreds — lightly touching, as occa
sion offers, on the higher notes. But in this matter, as
in all other matters, underneath the fine words, business
remains business ; and the business of politics is to get
the votes, without which the great prize of power could
not by any possibility be won. Votes must be had—
the votes of the crowd, both the rich and the poor
crowd, whatever may be the price which the market of
the day exacts from those who are determined to win.

II

So rolls the ball. We follow the inevitable course
that seeking for power forces upon us. Politics, in spite
of all better desires and motives, become a matter of
traffic and bargaining; and in the rude process of
buying, we find ourselves treading not only on the in
terests, but on the rights of others, and we soon learn
to look on it as a quite natural and unavoidable part of
the great game. Keener and keener grows the com
petition, more heart and brain -absorbing grows the
great conflict, and the people and the politicians cannot
help mutually corrupting each other. This buying up
of the groups is so distinctly recognized nowadays,
that lately a Times correspondent — whose letters we
read with much interest— speaking of a newly formed

THE GREAT MACHINE 15

ministry abroad, wrote, with unconscious cynicism, that
it would have to choose between leaning on the extreme
right or the extreme left.

What then — you may say — are we to believe; that
the whole body of those concerned with politics— in
which class we almost all in our degree are included —
— are selfish and corrupt, utterly disregarding and
despising the just claims of each other? I hope things
are not quite so bad as that. Human nature is a mixed
thing, and many of us contrive to think in the nobler
way and the smaller way at the same time. There is
at least one excuse that may be pleaded for us all.
What happens here — as happens in so many other
cases — is that carelessly and without reflection we place
ourselves under an untrue, a demoralizing and wrong
system, that fatally blinds and misleads us, lowers and
blunts the better part of our nature, and almost com
pels us, by the force that it exerts, to follow crooked
paths and do wrong things. I have not time to illus
trate this simple truth of the sacrifice of character to
system ; but let me take one instance of the injury that
results, whenever we lose our own self-guidance under
a system, that is wrong in itself, and, as a wrong system
so often is apt to be, despotic in its nature. I think
many of us see the existence of this injury as regards
character, when we watch that part of fashionable
society which makes of organized pleasure-hunting the
first occupation — I might almost say the duty — of life.
Here also people construct a system which overpowers
their individual sense of what is right and useful and
fitting; they submit themselves to the tyrannous rule
of follies of different kinds, as if they had no judgement,
no discriminating sense of their own, and as a con
sequence become as a mere race of butterflies, losing

i6 MR. SPENCER AND

the higher sense of things, and wasting their lives. In
all such instances, where lies the remedy? I think
both Mr. Spencer and Mr. Mill would have made the
same answer — you can only mend matters by individual
izing the individual. It is of little use preaching against
any hurtful system, until you go to the heart of the
matter, until you restore the individual to himself, until
you awaken in him his own perceptions, his own judge
ment of things, his own sense of right, until you allow
what Mr. Spencer called his own apparatus of motive —
and not an apparatus constructed for him by others — to
act freely upon him — an apparatus that tends sooner or
later to work to the better things ; and so detach him
from his crowd, which whirls him along helplessly,
wherever it goes, as the stream carries its unresisting
bubbles along with it. There lies the great secret of
the whole matter. We have as individuals to be above
every system in which we take our place, not beneath
it, not under its feet, and at its mercy; to use it, and
not to be used by it; and that can only be when we
cease to be bubbles, cease to leave the direction of
ourselves to the crowd — whatever crowd it is — social,
religious, or political — in which we so often allow our
better selves to be submerged.

It was for this individualizing of the individual that
both Mr. Spencer and Mr. Mill pleaded so powerfully;
only in the free individual, self-restraining, self-guiding,
that they saw, I think, the hope of true permanent good.
They saw that nobody yet has ever been saved— in the
best sense— or ever will be saved by vast systems of
machinery; Mr. Mill, perhaps, specially looking from
the moral point of view, and Mr. Spencer contrasting the
intellectual and material consequences of the two op
posed systems— self-guidance, and guidance by others.

THE GREAT MACHINE 17

And here, perhaps, I ought to add a few words.
Whilst we lay the heaviest share of blame upon the
political system that takes possession of us, and leaves
little room for self-guidance, are we to lay no direct
blame upon ourselves, for being content to take our
place in the system, that few, I think, in calm moments
of reflection, can fully justify to their own hearts ? Let
us be completely frank in this great matter. Is the
system of giving away power over ourselves, or seeking
to possess it over others, in itself right or wrong ? If it
is wrong, don't let us make excuses for acquiescing
in it; don't let us sigh and feebly wring our hands,
confessing the faults and dangers, but pleading that we
see no other way before us. Where there is a bad way,
there is also a good way, if men once resolutely set
themselves to find it. But you may, perhaps, doubt if
the system is wrong in itself; if it is not merely perverted
and turned from its true purpose by our human weak
nesses. You may be inclined to plead — ' It is true that
politicians must suppress a part of their own opinions ;
it is true that there is a sort of bargaining that goes
on among the groups, that in order to gain their own
special end, they have to act with other groups — groups
which may differ strongly from themselves on some
important points ; it is true also that the leaders of
a party must take all these groups into their calculations;
and as our American friends say — placate the interests ;
but there is not necessarily anything corrupt in such
action on the part of either the groups or the politicians,
or their leaders, at least so long as we can fairly credit
them all with desiring the common good, at the same
time as they pursue their own special interests, and
doing the best that the situation allows alike for these
two ends ; even if these ends may occasionally diverge

B

i8 MR. SPENCER AND

somewhat from each other. Of course we admit that
men may be easily tempted to overstep the just and
true line, may be tempted in the rivalry of parties,
in the strife for power, in the desire to seize the glitter
ing prize, to forget for a while the common good, to
push it back into the second place, to be over-keen
about their own interests ; no doubt the possession
of power has its dangers, and tempts many men to
say and do what we cannot defend ; but we must trust
to the general better and wiser feeling of the whole
people, or of the whole party, to hold in check these
aberrations of some of the fighters, and to strike the
balance fairly between the two influences. We must
remember that all action in common demands some
sacrifices; has its disabilities, as well as its great
advantages. We cannot act together, unless there is
a considerable — sometimes a large suppression of our
own selves. We must accept that bit of necessary
discipline ; we must be prepared to keep step with the
marching — (or ought you to say the manoeuvring) —
regiment, if we are to achieve anything by united action,
and not to remain as separate sticks, that no bond holds
together. All through life the same principle runs. In
every club, society, joint-stock undertaking, we submit
to guidance ; we give up a part of our views and desires
to gain the more important object — yet when we do
so, nobody accuses us of sacrificing our own guiding
sense, or of being corrupt, or of entering into a hurtful
and dangerous traffic.

Yes — I should reply — but in all these voluntary
associations you retain your own free choice ; you
can enter into them or leave them, as you think right ;
and that free choice in all these cases is the saving
element. But I ought to ask pardon of our friend, the

THE GREAT MACHINE 19

apologist, for interrupting him. ' Even if our political
system ' — it is our friend who is again speaking — ' has
its defects — grave defects if you like— still after all, it is
the instrument of progress, and we know of no other to
take its place. Surely it is more profitable to try to
mend its faults, than to quarrel with the whole thing, for
which we can see no substitute/ That I think is a fair
representation of the way in which many of us look
at political life, a way that perhaps supplies us with
some momentary consolation, when our minds are
troubled with what we see passing before us ; but how
far, if we try to see quite clearly, can we accept such
reasoning, as giving any real answer to the graver doubts
and hesitations ? Is it not only a bit of agreeable
sticking-plaster, laid over the sore place, an opiate-like
soothing of troubled consciences, hardly intended
seriously to touch the deeper part of the matter ? Let
us now try to look frankly beneath the surface, and
do our best to see what is the true nature of the system
in which we so easily acquiesce.

What does representative government mean? It
means the rule of the majority and the subjection of the
minority ; the rule of every three men out of five, and
the subjection of every two men. It means that all
rights go to the three men, no rights to the two men.
The lives and fortunes, the actions, the faculties and
property of the two men, in some cases their beliefs and
thoughts, so far as these last can be brought within the
control of machinery, are all vested in the three men, as
long as they can maintain themselves in power. The
three men represent the conquering race, and the two
men—vae metis as of old — the conquered race. As
citizens, the two men are de-citizenized ; they have lost
all share for the time in the possession of their country,

B 2

20 MR. SPENCER AND

they have no recognized part in the guidance of its
fortunes ; as individuals they are de-individualized, and
hold all their rights— if rights they have— on sufferance.
The ownership of their bodies, and the ownership of
their minds and souls — so far as you can transfer by
machinery the ownership of mind and soul from the
rightful owners to the wrongful owners— no more
belongs to them, but belongs to those who hold the
position of the conquering race. Now that is I believe
a true and uncoloured description of the system, as it is
in its nakedness, as it is in its real self, under which
we are content to live. It is not an exaggerated
description — there is not a touch in the picture with
which you can fairly quarrel. It is true that the real
logic of the system does not yet prevail. It is true that
a certain number of things may for a time modify and
restrain the final triumphs of the majority. In some
parliamentary countries, the majority tends to be more
composite in its character than with us, and therefore
tumbles more easily to pieces. On the other hand, with
us at least — whatever it may be in some other countries
that have Parliaments— minorities may rend the air and
reach the skies, if they can, with their cries and
complaints, and so to a certain extent may raise
difficulties — a method of warfare in which all minorities
grow more or less skilful by practice — in the path of the
majority; with us also there still exists happily a
friendlier, more genial spirit between all parts of the
people than prevails in other countries. Thanks to the
fact that the great serpent of bureaucracy holds us as
yet less closely in its folds — thanks to the still lingering
traditions of self-help and voluntary work ; thanks to the
good humour and love of fair play, which is to some
extent nursed by our fellowship in the same games that

THE GREAT MACHINE 21

all classes love — games that I think have redeemed
some part of the politician's mistakes, — the rule of the
majority is with us as yet more tempered, less violent
and unscrupulous, than it is in some other countries;
but give their full weight to all these modifying
influences, which as yet restrain our system of the
conquering and the conquered races from finding its
full development — still they do not alter the main, the
essential fact, that we are content to live under a system
that vests the rights of citizenship, the share in the
common country, the ownership of body, faculties, and
property, and to some extent, the ownership of mind
and soul, of, say, two-fifths of the nation in the hands of
the three-fifths. Such is the system in which we think
it right and self-respecting to acquiesce — a system which,
in the case of every two men out of five, wipes out at
a stroke, so far as the duties of citizenship are con
cerned, and even to a large extent as regards their
personal relations, all the higher part of their nature, their
judgement, conscience, will— treating them as degraded
criminals, who, for some unrecorded offence have
deserved to forfeit all the great natural rights, and to
lose their true rank as men. They tell us that now
adays men are not punished for their opinions. They
succeed in forgetting, I suppose, the case of every two
men out five.

Plead then, if you like, on behalf of such a system all
the expediencies of the moment, all the conveniences
that belong to power, all the pressing things you desire
to do through its machinery, plead objects of patriotism
plead objects of philanthropy ; yet are you right for the
sake of these things — excellent as they may be in them
selves—to acquiesce in that which — when stripped bare
to its real, its lowest terms, is — the words are not too

22 MR. SPENCER AND

harsh— the turning of one part of the nation into those
who own their slaves, and the other part into the slaves
who are owned? You may say, as a friend of mine
says — ( I feel neither like a slave-owner, nor like a
slave' — but his feelings, however admirable in them
selves, do not alter the system, in which he consents to
take part, of trying to obtain control over his fellow men ;
and, if he fails, in acquiescing in their control over him
self. He may never wish or mean to exercise unfairly
the power in which he believes, should it fall into his
hands; but can he answer for himself in the great
conflict ; can he answer for his allies, for the great
crowd, in which he will count for such a minute
fractional part, for what they will do, or where they will
go?

Ill

MY friend is quite aware, I think, that power is a
rather dangerous thing to handle ; but he will handle it
with good sense, in the spirit of moderation and fairness,
he will not suffer himself to let go of the great principles ;
he will not cross the boundary line that divides the
rightful from the wrongful use. Well, moderation, and
fairness, and good sense are excellent [things, not in
this matter alone, but in all matters. And so are the
great principles ; that is to say, if you see them in all
clearness and are determined to follow them. But the
saving power of the great principles depends upon how
far we loyally and consistently accept them. They can
be of little real help and guidance to us if we play and
trifle with them, accepting them to-day, and leaving
them on one side to-morrow, making them conform, as

THE GREAT MACHINE 23

occasion arises, to our desires and ambitions, and then
lightly finding excuses for deserting them whenever
we find them inconvenient. Let us once more be quite
frank. When we talk of fairness and moderation and
good sense, as constituting our defence against the
abuse of unlimited power, are we not living in the
region of words— using convenient phrases, as we so
often do, to smooth over and justify some course which
we desire to take, but about which in our hearts we feel
uncomfortable misgivings ? Let us by all means culti
vate as much fairness and moderation as possible — they
will always be useful — but don't let our trust in these good
things lead us away from the question that — like the
Sphinx's riddle — must be answered under penalties from
which there is no escape: — Is unlimited power — whether
with or without good sense and fairness — a right or wrong
thing in itself ? Can we in any way make it square with
the great principles ? Can we morally justify the putting
of the larger part of our mind and body — in some cases
almost the whole — under the rule of others; or the
subjecting of others in the same way to ourselves?
If you answer that it is a right thing— then see plainly
what follows. You are putting the force of the most
numerous, or perhaps of the most cunning, who often
lead the most numerous — which, disguise and polish the
external form of it as much as you like, will always
remain true to its own essentially brutal and selfish
nature — in the first place, making of it our supreme
principle; and if unlimited power — remember it is
unlimited power — power to do whatever the governing
majority thinks right— is a right thing, must you not
leave it — whatever may be your own personal views —
to those who possess it to decide how they will employ
it? You can't dictate to others, in the hour of their

24 MR. SPENCER AND

victory, as to what they will do or not do; and they
can't dictate to you, in the hour of your victory. Un
limited power — as the term expresses — can only be
defined and limited by itself; if it were subject to any
limiting principle, it would cease to be unlimited, and
become something of a different nature. And remember
always— when once you entered into the struggle for
the possession of this unlimited power, that you
sanctioned its existence, as a lawful prize, for which we
may all rightly contend ; and if the prize does not fall
to you, it will only remain for you to accept the con
sequences of your consent to take part in the reckless
and dangerous competition. By entering into that
conflict, by competing for that prize, you sanctioned the
ownership of some men by other men ; you sanctioned
the taking away from some men — say two-fifths of the
nation — all the great rights, and the reducing of them
to mere cyphers, who have lost power over themselves.
Once you have sanctioned the act of stripping the
individual of his own intelligence and will and conscience,
and of the self-guidance which depends upon these
things, you cannot then turn your back upon yourself,
and indignantly point to the mass of unhappy individuals
who are now writhing under the stripping process.
You should have thought of all this before you con
sented to put up the ownership of the individual to
public auction, before you consented to throw all these
rights into the great melting-pot. In your desire to
have power in your own hands, you threw away all
restraints, all safeguards, all limits as regards the using
of it ; you wanted to be able to do just as you yourself
pleased with it, when once you possessed it ; and what
good reason have you now to complain, when your rivals
— or shall I say your conquerors — in their turn do just

THE GREAT MACHINE 25

what they please with it ? You entered into the game
with all its possible penalties; you made your bed, it
only remains for you to lie on it.

Let us follow a little further this rightfulness of
unlimited power in which you believe. If it is a right
thing in itself, who shall give any clear and certain rule
to tell us when and where it ceases to be a right thing ?
Is any right thing by being pushed a little further, and
then a little further, and yet a little further, transformed
at some definite point into a wrong thing, unless some
new element, that changes its nature, comes into the
matter? The question of degree can hardly change
right into wrong in any authoritative way, that men
with their many varying opinions will agree to accept.
We may, and should for ever dispute over such mov
able boundary lines — lines that each man according to
his own views and feeling would draw for himself. If
it is right to use unlimited power to take the one-tenth
of a man's property, is it also right to take one-half or
the whole ? If it is not right to take the half, where
is the magical undiscoverable point at which right is
suddenly converted into wrong? If it is right to restrict
a man's faculties— not employed for an act of aggression
against his neighbour — in one direction, is it right to
restrict them in half a dozen or a dozen different
directions? Who shall say? It is a matter of opinion,
taste, feeling. Perhaps you answer — we will judge
each case on its merits; but then once more you are
in the illusory region of words, for, apart from any fixed
principle, the merits will be always determined by our
varying personal inclinations. It is all slope, ever
falling away into slope, with no firm level standing
place to be found anywhere. Nor do I feel quite sure,
if we speak the truth, that any of us are much inclined

26 MR. SPENCER AND

to accept the rule of moderation and good sense in this
matter. You and I, who have entered into this great
struggle for unlimited power, have made great efforts
and sacrifices to obtain it ; now that we have won our
prize, why should we not reap the full fruits of victory ;
why should we be sparing and moderate in our use of
it ? Is not the labourer worthy of his wage ; is not the
soldier to receive his prize money? If power was worth
winning, it must be worth using. If power is a good
thing, why should we hold back our hand ; why not do
all we can with it, and extract from it its full service and
usefulness ? Our efforts, our sacrifices of time, money
and labour, and perhaps of principle — if that is worth
counting — were not made for the possession of mere
fragmentary pieces of power, but for power to do
exactly as we please with our fellow men. It is rather
late in the day, now that we have won the stake, to tell
us that we must leave the larger part of it lying on the
table; that, having defeated the enemy, we must
evacuate his territory, and not even ask for an in
demnity to compensate us for our sacrifices. If power,
as an instrument, is good in itself, now that we hold it
in our hand, why break its point and blunt its edge?
And then what about the great principles, which my
friend does not propose exactly to follow, but on which
at all events he will be good enough to keep a watchful
eye ? Where are they ? What are they ? What great
principle remains, when you have sanctioned unlimited
power ? You can't appeal to any of the great rights — as
rights; the rights of self-ownership and self-guidance,
the rights of the free exercise of faculties, the rights of
thought and conscience, the rights of property, they are
no longer the recognized and accepted rules of human
actions ; they are now reduced to mere expediencies, to

THE GREAT MACHINE 27

which each man will assign such moderate value as he
chooses. You are now out in the great wilderness, far
away from all landmarks. Around the throne of
unlimited power stretches the vast solitude of an empty
desert. Nothing can be fixed or authoritative in its
presence; by the fact of its existence, by the con
ditions of its nature, it becomes the one supreme thing,
acknowledging — except perhaps occasionally in courtly
phrases for soothing purposes — nothing above itself,
writing its own ethics, interpreting its own necessities,
making of its own safety and continuance the highest
law, and contemptuously dismissing all other dis
crowned rivals from its presence.

Now turn from the discussion of the moral basis of
unlimited power to the practical working of our power-
systems. There is I think one blessed fact that runs
through all life — that if a thing is wrong in itself, it
won't work. No skill, no ingenuity, no elaborate com
binations of machinery, will make it work. No amount
of human artifice and contrivance, no alliance with force,
no reserves of guns and bayonets, no nation in arms
even if almost countless in number, can make it work.
So is it with our systems of power. They don't work
and they can't work. In no real sense, can you, as the
autocrat, govern men ; in no real sense, can the people
imitate the autocrat and govern each other. The govern
ment of men by men is an illusion, an unreality, a mere
semblance, that mocks alike the autocrat and the crowd
that attempt to imitate him. We think in our amazing
insolence that we can deprive our fellow men of their
intelligence, their will, their conscience ; we think we
can take their soul into our own keeping ; but there is
no machinery yet discovered by which we can do what
seems to us so small and easy a matter. We think that

28 MR. SPENCER AND

the autocrat governs his slaves, but the autocrat himself
is only one slave the more amongst the crowd of other
slaves. In the first place he himself is governed by his
own vast machinery ; helpless he stands — one of the
pitiable objects in this world of ours — in the midst of the
countless wheels which he can set in motion, but which
other forces direct; and then even the wheels have
souls of their own, though not perhaps very beautiful
ones, and ever likely to go a persistent and obstinate
way of their own ; but what is of deeper consequence is
that his government is silently conditioned by the slaves
themselves. Sunk in their darkness, helpless, inarticu
late, they may be ; yet for all that they in their turn are
slave-owners as well as slaves, as always happens wher
ever you build up these great fabrics of power. Whilst
the slaves obey, they also, though they utter no word,
in their turn command. If the autocrat disregards that
silent voice, disregards the unspoken conditions that
they impose upon him, then in its own due time comes
the great crash, and his power passes from him, a
broken and miserable wreck. You may crush and hold
in subjection for a time the external part of men, but
you cannot govern and possess their soul. Their soul
lies out of your reach, and is in its nature as ungovern
able as the wind or the wave. You may trick and deceive
it for a time ; you may make it the instrument of its own
slavery by cleverly arranged systems of conscription,
and other governing devices ; you may cast it into a
deep sleep, but sooner or later it wakes, and rebels, and
claims its own inheritance in itself. In the same way
there is no such thing as what is called the self-govern
ment of a nation. How can you get self-government
by turning one half of a nation into a second-hand copy
of a Tsar? That, as Mill showed long ago, is not self-

THE GREAT MACHINE 29

government ; but government by others. It is true
that here, as with the autocrat, a majority can for
a season use for its own ends and oppress a minority,
can do with it what in its heart it lusts to do, can make
it the corpus vile of its experiments, can make of it
a drawer of water and hewer of wood ; but it is only for
a short day. Here again that uncompromising thing,
the soul, stands in the way, and refuses to be transferred
from the rightful to the wrongful owner. The power of
the majority wanes, and the power of the minority grows,
and the oppressor and the oppressed change places.
But apart from all the deeper reasons that make the
subjection of men by men impossible, was there ever
such a hopeless, I might say absurd, bit of machinery-
only to be compared to a child's attempt to put together
a wooden clock out of the chippings left in the wood
basket — as the thing which we call a representative
system? Invent all the ingenious plans that you like,
but by no possibility can you represent a nation for
governing purposes. The whole thing is a mere phrase.
Let us see what actually happens. Suppose a nation
with 5,000,000 voters — 2,000,000 voting on one side, and
3,000,000 on the other. In such a case we start with
the astounding, the absurd, the grotesque fact that there
is no attempt made to represent the 2,000,000. Even if
you had a system of minority representation, it might
possibly serve in some small measure to soothe the
feelings of the subject race ; it would not alter the hard
fact of their subjection. But at present the 2,000,000
voters find no place of any kind in our calculations ;
they are simply swept off the board, not counted. That
is the first remarkable feature of the representative
system ; and that, as you will admit, is not the happiest
beginning with which to start. If representation con-

3o MR. SPENCER AND

stitutes the moral basis of power — then the fact, that
out of every five men two should be left unrepresented,
requires a good deal of explanation ; two-fifths of the
moral basis at all events are wholly wanting. We are
fond of talking of our representative system as if it
rested on a democratic foundation ; but under which of
the three great democratic principles — equality, fra
ternity, liberty— does the sweeping off the board of two-
fifths of the nation, the two men out of every five, find
its sanction ?

Let us, however, for the present leave the 2,000,000
voters to their fate. They are, as we have seen, only
a subject race; and subject races must be duly reason
able, and not expect too great a share in the privileges of
conquering races. Now let us turn to the case of the
happy triumphant 3,000,000 voters, who hold in sub
jection the 2,000,000 voters. Are they themselves
represented in any true sense ? Let us see what
happens to them — the majority, who are good enough
for a time to take charge of all of us. Unlimited power
means that our lords and masters of the moment may
deal, that they will probably try to deal, with every,
or almost every field of human activity. If there are —
say — ten great State departments, such as trade, foreign
affairs, local government, home government, and .the
rest ; and if we suppose with due moderation that there
are ten great questions connected with each of these
departments, that may at any moment occupy the
attention of our presiding majority, then we have a grand
total of a hundred questions, upon which the opinions
of the 3,000,000 electors will have to be represented.
But alas ! for our unfortunate and inconvenient human
differences ; how can the victorious 3,000,000 be repre
sented on these hundred questions, when, if they think

THE GREAT MACHINE 31

at all, they will all think more or less differently from
each other? To express fully their many differences,
they ought to have nearly 3,000,000 representatives ;
but we will not ask for perfection ; so let us divide
the number by a hundred and say 30,000 representatives
— an arrangement which, if the representatives met and
talked for twenty hours every day in the year, would
give, let us say, something over eight seconds of talking
time for each representative during the course of the
year as regards each of the hundred questions. When
they had each talked their eight or nine seconds, how
much real agreement should you expect to find among
our 30,000 representatives on their hundred questions ?
Place twenty men in a room to discuss one subject ;
and how many different opinions will you collect at the
end, if the twenty men are intelligent, and interested in
the subject ? Will you not probably find three or four
groups of opinions, each group representing a more
or less different view? Now bring the 30,000 repre
sentatives together, and require them to agree, not on
one subject, but on a hundred important and often
complicated subjects. Remember they must agree—
they have no choice — that necessity of agreement
overrides everything else, for otherwise they cannot act
together; but then comes the question — what is their
agreement — forced upon them by the practical necessity
of acting together as one man — morally worth? Is
is not a mere form, a mere mockery, a mere illusion ?
They must agree ; and they do agree ; for the
continuance of the party system, the winning of power,
the subjecting of their rivals — all this depends on their
agreeing; but in what sort of fashion, by what kind
of mental legerdemain, is their agreement reached ? It
can only be reached in one simple way — by a wholesale

32 MR. SPENCER AND

system of self-effacement. The 30,000 individuals must
be content on, say, ninety-five per cent, of the hundred
questions, to have no opinions ; or if they have opinions,
to swallow ninety-five per cent, of their opinions at a
gulp, and to play the convenient, if somewhat inglorious
part of cyphers. Yet under our system it is this larger
half of the nation, these 3,000,000 voters, who have
undertaken the responsibility of thinking and acting for
the nation, of deciding these hundred questions both for
themselves and for the rest of us; and the only way
of deciding left to them is to efface themselves, and
have no opinions— a rather sad anti-climax, I am afraid,
to some of our everyday rhetoric on the subject of
representative systems. If we look closely we find that
these systems only mean — that if we have no personal
opinions, we can be represented, so far as it is possible
or worth while to represent blank sheets of paper ; if we
have personal opinions, we can't be represented. The
question then forces itself upon us, is it a bit of honest
work, is it profitable, is it worth the trouble, to construct
a huge machinery for the purpose of representing
cyphers, who have no opinions ; and when we have
constructed our illusory, our make-believe machine,
to go into the market-place, and therefrom deliver
ourselves of speeches about the excellence of our
self-governing system ? Is it right and true to set
up a moral responsibility on the part of those who
profess to govern, that cannot by any possibility be
turned into a reality ; to ask half the nation to sit in the
seat of universal judgement — there to take their part in
what is and must be an only half disguised farce?
Does it not tell us something of the true nature of
power, when we find ourselves obliged to descend
to tricks of this kind in order to possess and to use it ?

THE GREAT MACHINE 33

Does it mend matters to say that under our system
we choose the best man available, and leave the hundred
questions for him to deal with? That is only our
old friend, the autocrat, come back once more, with
a democratic polish rubbed over his face to disguise and,
as far as may be, to beautify his appearance. Our
sin consists in the suppression of our own selves and
our own opinions ; and in one sense we fall lower than
the slaves of the autocrat, for they are simply sinned
against, but we take an active part in the sin against
ourselves.

And now how does this suppression of ourselves
come about? There must be some powerful motive
acting upon us, to induce us to take our place cheerfully
in such a poor sort of comedy. Men don't suppress
themselves, except to gain something that they much
desire. Let us be frank once more, and confess we are
bribed into this self-suppression by our reckless desire
for power, and our desire to use the power, when gained,
for special interests of our own. The power that we seek
to win is a hard taskmaster as regards its conditions, and
exacts that humiliating price from us. We take our own
bribe for giving up our opinions, and play the part of
cyphers, and at the same time bribe those others who are
to play their part with us ; we ask no questions of our
conscience, but go on to the political Exchange, and there
with a light heart do the necessary selling and buying.

Now follow a little further this process of self-sup
pression, this process of making the cyphers. When
you have once required of men to efface themselves and
all the higher part of themselves, in order that they may
act together, then follows that bargaining and juggling
with the groups, of which I have already spoken. The
disinterested opinions — 95 per cent, of them, as we

c

34 MR. SPENCER AND

calculated — have vanished, much in the same fashion as
the 2,000,000 voters vanished ; they are swept off the
board, as things for which no place can be found, but
which are only very much in the way of the real
business in hand ; and only a few leading self-interests
—three or four perhaps — still remain. Now you may
bind unbought men together, in the one and true way,
by their opinions ; but when they have no opinions
you must find a cement of a coarser and more material
kind. Having once turned men into cyphers, nothing
remains but to treat them as cyphers. The great trick
—the winning of power — requires cyphers, and can't be
played in any other fashion. Having once turned men
into cyphers, you must appeal to them as good loyal
party followers ; or you must appeal to them as likely
to get more from you than from any other buyer in
the market : you can't appeal to them — except in the
imaginative moments when you are treading the flowery
paths of rhetoric — as men, possessed of conscience, and
will, and responsibility, for in that case they might once
more regain possession of their suppressed consciences
and their higher faculties, and begin to think and judge
for themselves — a result that would have very incon
venient consequences; for then they would no longer
agree to have one opinion on the hundred subjects ;
they would divide and scatter themselves in all sorts of
directions; they would be a source of infinite trouble
and vexation to the distracted party- managers ; they
would no longer be of use as fighting material ; and the
well-disciplined army would dissolve into an infinite
number of separate and divergent fragments. No ! as
long as party faces party, and the great struggle for
power goes on, the rank and file, however intelligent,
however well-educated, must be content to think with

THE GREAT MACHINE 35

the party. They can't think for themselves, for if they
did they would think differently ; and if they thought
differently, they could not act together ; so they must be
content to be just war-material, very like the masses of
conscripts which foreign governments occasionally
employ to hurl against each other. If they were any
thing else, it would be a very poor fighting show that
our political parties would make on their battle-field.
The great struggle for power would die out, would
come naturally to its end, when the suppression of self
and the making of the cyphers had ceased to be.

It is well to notice here that in some other countries
you have not two political parties of the same definite
character as with us, but a large number of groups.
The fact of the groups very slightly affects the situation.
Under every system the vices that go with the seeking
for power return in pretty nearly the same form. The
groups can't form a majority, and obtain power, unless
they amalgamate ; which means that each group has its
market price, makes the best bargain that it can for
itself, and for the sake of that bargain consents to act
with, and so to increase the strength and influence of
those with whom it may be in strong disagreement. Of
course hopeless moral confusion arises from this
temporary amalgamation of the odds and evens, and
separate, unlike pieces, from this making of a common
cause by those who mean different things, and are
almost as much opposed to each other as they are to
the common enemy, to whom for the moment they are
opposed. Under no circumstances can we afford to
depart from the great principle that we must never
abandon our own personality, that we must only strive
for the ends in which we ourselves believe, and never
consent to enter into combinations, in which we either

c 2

36 MR. SPENCER AND

are used against our convictions, or use others against
their convictions. Whenever we descend to 'log
rolling ' — your services to pay for my services — we are
lost in a sea of intrigue and corruption, and all true
guidance disappears. There is no true guidance for any
of us, except in our own best and highest selves, in our
own personal sense of what is true and right. When
that goes, there is little, if anything, worth the saving.

And now, passing by many incidents in the working
of the great machine, that is so largely indulgent to our
fighting and bargaining propensities, I come to what
seems to me the very heart of Mr. Spencer's social and
political teaching. It is not often given to a man to sum
up in three words a great truth, that is fated sooner or
later to revolutionize the thought and action of all
nations; and yet that is, I think, what Mr. Spencer
happily achieved. The three words were — ' progress is
difference' — that is, if you or I are to think more
clearly, or to act more efficiently and more rightly than
those who have preceded us, it can only be because at
some point we leave the path which they followed, and
enter a new path of our own — in other words, we must
have the temper and courage to differ from accepted
standards of thought and perception and action. If we
are to improve in any direction, we must not be bound
up with each other in inseparable bundles, we must
have the power in ourselves to find and to take the new
path of our own. Is not every improvement of
machinery and method, every gain made in science and
art, every choosing of the truer road and turning away
from the false road that we have hitherto trodden— does
it not all arise from those differences of thought and
perception which, so long as freedom exists, even in its
present imperfect forms, are from time to time born

THE GREAT MACHINE 37

amongst us? Whenever men become merely copies
and echoes of each other, when they act and think
according to fixed and sealed pattern, is not all growth
arrested, all bettering of the world made difficult, if not
impossible ? What hope of real progress, when differ
ence has almost ceased to exist ; when men think in the
same fashion as a regiment marches ; and no mind feels
the life-giving stimulating impulse which the varying
competing thoughts of others brings with it? Do we
not see in some parts of the East, when men are bound
rigidly together under one system of thought, how
difficult, how painful, the next upward step becomes ;
and when the change comes, how dissolvent and
destructive it tends to be? Do we not see the same
thing in Churches and States nearer home — the more
that minds are uniformly subjected to one system, the
more difficult becomes the adaptation of the old to the
new, the more violent revolutionary and catastrophic
the change when it takes place ? Safety only lies in the
constant differences which many living minds, looking
from their own standpoint, in turn contribute. All
unity, that exists by means of social or artificial restraint
of differences, is slowly but inevitably moving towards
its own destruction — a destruction that must finally
involve much pain and confusion and disorder, because
change and adaptation have been so long resisted.

Now if we accept this simple but most far-reaching
truth— 'progress is difference* — as I think we must
do— let us frankly and loyally accept it with all the
great consequences which follow from it. If progress
is the child of difference, then it is for us to let our
social and political systems favour difference to the
fullest extent possible. At no point must we imprison
minds under those fighting systems, which always

38 MR. SPENCER AND

restrain thought and lavour mechanical discipline-
fighting is one thing and thinking is another; at no
point must we stereotype action, preventing its natural
and healthy divergence ; at no point throw difficulties
in the way of effort and experiment; at no point
de-individualize men by making them dull repetitions
of each other, soulless, automatic cyphers, lost, helpless
in their crowd; but everywhere we must allow the
natural rewards and inducements and motives to act
upon free self-guiding men and women, encouraging
them to feel that the work of improvement, the work
of world-bettering, the achieving of progress, lies in
their own hands, as individuals, and that, if they wish
to share in this great common work, they must strive
individually to live at their best. Throughout the
whole nation, we must let every man and woman,
instead of looking to their parties and parliaments and
governments, feel the full strength of the inspiring
inducement to do something in their own individual
capacities and to join with others in doing something —
the smallest or the greatest thing— better than it has
yet been done, and so make their own contribution to
the great fund of general good. Only so can the
far-reaching powers which lie in human nature, but
which, like the talent, are so often wrapped in the
napkin, hidden and unused, find their full scope and
development; only so can our aims and ambitions be
ennobled and purified ; only so can the true respect for
the individuality of others soften the strife of opinions,
and the intolerant spirit in which we so often look
upon all that is opposed to and different from ourselves.
As we recognize and respect the individuality both of
ourselves and others ; as we realize that the bettering
of the world depends upon our individual actions and

THE GREAT MACHINE 39

perceptions; that this bettering can only be done by
ourselves, acting together in free combination ; that it
depends upon the efforts of countless individuals, as
the rain-drops make the streams, and the streams make
the rivers, that it cannot be done for us by proxy,
cannot be relegated, in our present indolent fashion, to
systems of machinery, or handed over to an army of
autocratic officials to do for us ; and as we realize that
we shall have failed in our part, have lived almost in
vain, if in some direction, in some department of
thought or action — whatever it may be— we have not
individually striven to make the better take the place of
the good; life will become for all of us a better and
nobler thing, with more definite aims, and greater
incentives to useful action. The work that we do will
react on ourselves; and we shall react on the work.
Each victory gained, each new thing well done will
make the men, the fighters for progress ; and as
the fighters are raised to a higher capacity, the progress
made will advance with bolder, swifter strides, invading
in turn every highway and by-way of life. But this
healthy reaction cannot be as long as we live under
the depressing and dispiriting influence of the great
machines, that take the work out of our hands, and
encourage in us all a sense of personal uselessness.
The appeal must be straight and direct to the in
dividuals, to their own self-direction, their own self-
sacrifice, to their own efforts in free unregulated
combinations, their own willing gifts and services.

It is in vain that you will ask for the progress, that
is born in the conflict of competing thoughts and
perceptions, from the great official departments, into
whose hands you now so complacently resign yourself.
They are incapacitated as instruments of progress by

4o MR. SPENCER AND

the law of their own being. Whenever you act and
think wholesale, and in authoritative fashion for others,
you become to a certain extent limited and incapacitated
in your own nature. That mental penalty for ever
dogs the possession of power. You lose sight of the
great and vital ends, and allow the small things to
change places with the all-important things. You are
no more in touch with the living forces that make for
progress. Why? Are the reasons far to seek? The
body of officials — however good and honourable in them
selves — form a caste, that administers the administered,
and does not really share in the actual life of the
nation ; the chiefs, intent upon the huge machine, which
they direct from behind their office windows ; the large
body, dutifully following their traditions, and clinging
to their precedents. They are cut off from all the great
inspirations, for the great inspirations are only likely
to come to those who share in the active throbbing life
that is not found in any one part, but in the whole, of
a free nation, and that exists, as we have seen, as the
sum of countless differing contributions. The best
inspirations only readily come to those who live open
to all influences, who are not narrowed and limited by
that sense of slightly contemptuous superiority, which
we all — however excellent we may be — are apt to feel
when we are treating others as passive material under
our hands. I doubt if you can ever impose your own
will by means of force on others, without acquiring in
yourself something of this superior scorn. But this
scorn is fatal to the great inspirations, for they are only
born in us when we are in truest personal sympathy
with the upward movement, whatever it may be, when
we ourselves are part of it, when we are thinking and
feeling freely, and are surrounded by those thinking

THE GREAT MACHINE 41

and feeling like ourselves, for in real free life we are for
ever giving and receiving, absorbing and radiating.
There and there only do you get the true soil-bed of
progress. Nor, if our official classes were willing to
be helped by the thought of others, is it possible.
Under their authoritative systems they have made the
people helpless, apathetic, indifferent; and so have to
carry the great burden of thinking for a nation on their
own shoulders alone. Few people really think or
perceive, who can give no practical effect to their
thoughts and perceptions; and so it is that we see
administered nations grow first indifferent, and then
revolutionary. It is thus, in this vicious circle, that
bureaucracy ever works. Our bureaucrats, with their
universal systems, paralyse and benumb the best
thought and energies of the nation ; and then them
selves are mentally starved in the dead-alive condition
of things that they have created. Then again our official
classes are not only, like the autocrat, controlled and
disabled by their own machinery, but they fall — who
could help it ? — under the drowsy influence of the ever
revolving wheels. The habit of doing the one thing
in the same fixed way depresses the brighter faculties,
and the vis inertiae becomes the paramount force. The
machinery, on which everything depends, takes the
first place; its moral and spiritual effect upon the
people take the second or third place, or no place at
all. Thus it is that every huge administrative system
tends to that barren uniformity which is a kind of
intellectual death, and from which that essential element
of progress — experiment, is necessarily absent. When
you have constructed a universal system, embracing
the whole nation, you can't experiment. The thousands
of wheels must all follow each other in the same track

42 MR. SPENCER AND

with undeviating uniformity. Even if your official
feelings would allow of such an unorthodox proceeding,
it is mechanically very difficult to interfere with the
regularity and precision that make the working of
universal systems possible. And so it happens that not
only is a man with new ideas a real terror inside the
walls of a great department, but that there are two
phases that succeed each other in turn in the life of
these departments. There is the period of somnolence,
the mechanical repetition of what had been said and
done in past years, the same sending out of the old
time-honoured forms, the same pigeon-holing of the
answers, the same holding of inspections, the same
administering of the nation by the junior clerks ; and
with it all, complete insensibility as to what influence
the system as a whole is exercising on the soul of the
people. The daily thought and care of a good official
begins and ends with taking precautions that the
system, as a system, is working smoothly and without
friction. As to what the system is in itself, it is not his
province to think, and he very rarely does think. He
did not create it; he is not directly responsible for it — as
a rule nobody knows who is responsible for it— his
work is simply to make the countless wheels duly
follow each other with regularity and precision. That
somnolent period, however, only lasts for a time;
presently comes the revolutionary period of remorse
lessly pulling down and then building up in haste —
a period in which the department suddenly awakes
from its sleep — aroused perhaps by some external
impulse, perhaps by the truer perceptions, or perhaps
by the wayward fancies of some Minister, fresh to
office, who longs to inaugurate his own little revolution.
Then the sleepers become changed into reformers ;

THE GREAT MACHINE 43

and suddenly we are authoritatively assured that we
have been following altogether wrong methods, that
the old system, under which serious evils have been
growing up, must be at once transformed into some
thing of a new and very different order. The nation,
dully and dimly aware that things are not as they
should be, smiles approvingly, and through its press,
faintly applauds ; and the plant, perhaps of some twenty
years' growth, is straightway torn up by the roots — a
fate which after a few years will be again shared by
the new thing that now takes its place. It is not the
fault of the officials. If you or I were in their place
we should be just as somnolent, and just as revolu
tionary. The fault lies in the great system itself; and
few of us could resist the spell that it exercises. The
truth is that you can no more administer a whole nation
than you can represent it. You cannot deal with
human nature wholesale ; you cannot throw it higgledy
piggledy into one common lot, and let half a dozen
men, no better or worse than ourselves, take charge
of it. No universal system is a living thing: they all
tend to become mere machines — machines of a rather
perverse kind, that have incurable tricks of going their
own way. We are apt to think that our machines
dutifully serve and obey us ; but in large measure we
serve and obey them. They too have souls of their
own, and command as well as obey. Unfortunately for
us, progress and improvement are not amongst the
things that great machines are able to supply at
demand. Their soul lies in mechanical repetition,
not in difference ; whilst progress requires not only
faculties in the highest state of vital activity, but I might
almost say continual, mental dissatisfaction with what
has been already achieved, and continual preparedness

44 MR. SPENCER AND

to invade new territory and attempt new victories.
Progress depends upon a great number of small
changes and adaptations and experiments, constantly
taking place — each carried out by those who have
strong beliefs and clear perceptions of their own in the
matter ; for the only true experimenter is he who finds
and follows his own way, and is free to try his
experiment from day to day.. But this true experi
mentation is impossible under universal systems. An
experiment can only be tried on a small scale by those
who are the clearer-sighted amongst us, and are aiming
at some particular end, and when those who are
affected by it are willing to take the risk. You can't
rightly experiment with a whole nation ; and the
consequence is that the sin and mistakes of every
universal system go on silently accumulating, until the
time comes for the next periodical tearing up by the
roots of what exists comes due, and once more we
start afresh.

And now there are still many other points on which
I must not touch to-day. There is that great subject
of excessive public expenditure in all countries, which
is like a tide which flows and flows and hardly ever
ebbs. A few years ago when some of us began to
preach voluntary taxation, as the only effectual means
of recovering the gradually disappearing independence
of the individual, and of placing governments in their
true position of agents, and not, as they are to-day, of
autocrats and masters of the nation, and as the plainest
and most direct means of making the recognition of the
principle of individual liberty supreme in our national
life, I found most of my friends quite content to be used
as tax-material, even though the sums of money taken
from them were employed against their own beliefs and

THE GREAT MACHINE 45

interests. They had lived so long under the system
of using others, and then in their turn being used
by them, that they were like hypnotized subjects, and
looked on this subjecting and using of each other as
a part of the necessary and even Providential order
of things. The great machine had taken possession
of their souls ; and they only yawned and looked bored,
or slightly scornful at any idea of rebelling against
it. In vain we drew the picture of the nobler, happier,
safer life of the nation, when men of all conditions
voluntarily combined to undertake the great services,
class co-operating with class, each bound to the other
by new ties of friendship and kindliness, with all its
different groups learning to discover their own special
wants, to follow their own methods, and make their own
experiments. In that way only, as we urged, could we
replace the present dangerous and mischief-making
strife with blessed fruitful peace, create a happier,
better, nobler spirit amongst us all, destroy the old
traffic and bargaining of the political market, destroy
the fatal belief that one class might rightly prey upon
another class, and that all property finally belonged
to those who could collect the greater number of votes
at the polls. That belief in the omnipotent vote, as
we urged, was striking its roots deeper every year — it
was the certain, the inevitable result of our party
fighting for the possession of power. So long as the
vote carried with it the unlimited undefined power
of the majority, the giving away of property must
always remain as the easiest means of purchasing the
owners of the vote ; and that belief in the final owner
ship of property being vested in the voter we could only
fight, not by resisting here or there, not by denouncing
this or that bit of excessive and wasteful expenditure,

46 MR. SPENCER AND

but by challenging the rightfulness and good sense
of the whole system, by pointing to a truer, nobler,
social life, and by resolutely standing on the plain broad
principle of individual* "control over ourselves and our
own property. It was in friendly voluntary co-operation,
as free men and women, for all public wants and
services ; in taking each other's hands, in sharing our
efforts ; it was by destroying the belief in power, the
belief in ' pooling ' property and faculties, the belief
in the false right of some men to hold other men in
subjection, and to use them as their material ; in building
up the belief in the true rights, the rights of self-owner
ship and self-guidance, apart from which everything
tends to the confusion and corruption of public life —
it was only so that we could ward off the coming danger
and the inevitable strife. These great national services,
that we had so lightly flung into the hands of our
officials, were the true means of creating that higher
and better national life, with its friendly inter-depen
dence, its need of each other, its respect for each other,
which was worth over and over again all the political
gifts and compulsions — though you piled them up in
a heap as high as Pelion thrown on the top of Ossa. It
was only so that the nation would find its true peace
and happiness, and that the smouldering dread and
hatred of each other could die out. The years have
passed ; and I think a change of mood has silently come
over many persons. I find that some of those who
once clung to compulsion as the saving social bond,
as the natural expression of national life, are willing
to-day to consider whether some better and truer and
safer principle may not be found; are willing to
consider, as a practical question, if some limit should
not be placed on the power to take and to spend in

THE GREAT MACHINE 47

unmeasured quantity the money of others. Our friend
the Socialist has done, and is doing for us his excellent
and instructive work. He stands as a very striking —
I might say eloquent landmark, showing us plainly
enough where our present path leads, and what is
the logical completion of our compulsory interferences,
our restrictions of faculties, and our transfer of property
by the easy — shall I say by the laughable and grotesque
— process of the vote ? Into our present system, which
so many men accept without thinking of its real
meaning, and its further consequences, he introduces
an order, a consistency, a completeness of his own.
His logic is irresistible. If you can vote away half the
yearly value of property under the form of a rate, as
we do in some towns at present, then under the same
convenient and elastic right you can vote away the nine-
tenths or the whole. * Only logic ' perhaps you lightly
answer — but remember, unless you change the direction
of the forces, logic always tends to come out victorious in
the end. Let us then take the bolder, the truer, the
more manful course. If we believe in property, as
a right and just thing, if, as the product of faculties, we
believe it to be inseparably connected with the free
use of faculties, and therefore inseparably connected
with freedom itself; if we believe that it is a mere bit of
word-mockery to tell us — as our Socialist friends do —
that they are presenting the world with the newest, the
most perfect, the most up-to-date form of liberty, whilst
from their heights of scorn for liberty they calmly deny
to every man and woman the right to employ their
faculties in their own way and for their own advantages,
offering us in return a system beyond all words petty
and irritating, a system that would provoke rebellion
even in the nursery, and which, as a clever French

48 MR. SPENCER AND

writer wittily remarked, would periodically convulse
the State — with the ever-recurring insoluble question-
might or might not a wife mend the trousers of her
husband; if we believe that the Socialist, treading
in the footsteps of his predecessor, the autocrat, has only
discovered one more impossible system of slavery, then
let us individually do our best to end the great delusion
— that has given birth to the Socialist, and made him
the power that he is to-day in Europe— that property
belongs, not to the property-owner, but to those who are
good enough to take the trouble to vote. Don't let
us play any longer with these dangerous forces, which,
if they win, will for a time wholly change the course
of human civilisation ; and above all don't let us put it
in the power of the voter to turn round some future day
and say to us— 'As long as it served your interests and
ambitions, you acknowledged the supremacy of the
vote ; you acknowledged this right of taking property
from each other. You taught us, you sanctioned,
through many years, the principle of unlimited power,
vested in some men over other men. Is it not now
a little late in the day for you suddenly to cry ' halt '
in the path along which you have so long led us, because
you see new interests and ambitions taking their place
by the side of your own discredited interests and
ambitions, which are no longer able to satisfy the heart
of the nation ? If the old game was good enough and
right enough in your hands, when you were our leaders,
so is the new game right and good enough in our
hands, now that it is our turn to lead/ What true, what
sufficient answer would there remain for us to make ?
Were it not better to repent of our past sins to-day,
whilst there is yet time and opportunity to do something
to repair them ? If we are only to begin to quarrel

THE GREAT MACHINE 49

with power and its consequences when we find that it
has already slipped away from our hands, shall we not be
too much like the grey-haired sinner who turns saint
in that sad period when the pleasures of life have already
ceased to exist for him ? Better to repent whilst there
is still something to sacrifice and renounce ; and we can
still give some proof that our repentance is the child of
real conviction.

Let us try to clear our thoughts, and know our own
minds in this great matter. Do we or do we not mean
to consent to that final act in the long drama which is
euphemistically called ' the nationalizing of property ' ?
If we do not mean to consent to that last crowning act
of the process of voting away the property of each
other, then it is not only an unworthy weakness on our
part, but a cruel wrong to encourage by our words and
actions in the mass of the people a belief, which some
day, when it grows to its full strength and height, we
shall scornfully — whatever our scorn may then avail —
disown and reject, forgetting with our changed attitude
how we once planted that belief in their hearts, used it,
and played with it for the sake of our ambition and our
desire to possess power. When the great bitter strife
comes — as it must come — shall we not be constrained
with shame to accuse ourselves, and to acknowledge
our misleading of the people, our responsibility in the
past for the infinite calamities we have brought both
upon them and upon ourselves. Do not let us wait for
that future so fraught with evil, which our own careless
ness of thought, our disregard of the great principles,
our love of the wildly exciting political game, and our
subservience to party interests are preparing for us.
The hours of the day are not yet spent. The temper of
our people is a noble generous temper, if you appeal to

D

5o MR. SPENCER AND

it in the true way, appealing for right's sake, for
principle's sake, not merely for the sake of class or party
or personal interests, not merely for the sake of the
many pleasant things that belong to the possession of
property. Let us make some sacrifice of our political
ambitions, and take our stand on the truest, highest
ground. Our task is to make it clear to the whole
nation that a great principle, that which involves the free
use of faculties, the independence of every life, the self-
guidance and self-ownership, the very manhood of all of
us, that commands and constrains us to preserve the
inviolability of property for all its owners — whoever
they may be. The inviolability of property is not
simply the material interest of one class who happen
to-day to possess it, it is the supreme interest of all
classes. True material prosperity can only be won by
the great body of the nation through the widest
measure of liberty — not the half-and-half, not the mock
system, that exists at present. Create the largest and
most generous system of liberty, create— as you will do
with it — the vital energizing spirit of liberty, and in
a few short years the working classes would cease to be
the propertyless class ; would become with their great
natural qualities the largest property-owner in the
country. But this can only be, as they set themselves
in earnest to make property instead of taking it, and to
put the irresistible pence and shillings together for the
carrying out of all the great services. This in truth
was the splendid campaign on which he had entered,
when the politician, sometimes hungering to play the
important part, and to exalt his small restless self, some
times misled by nobler dreams, drew his deluding
herring across the path, and pointed to the easier down
hill way of the common fund and the all-powerful vote.

THE GREAT MACHINE 51

It is the politician with his cheap liberality and his
giving away of what does not belong to him, who per
petuates the depressed and unprogressive condition of
a large part of the people ; he is only too much like
those who nurse poverty by their careless and mis
placed charity. He stands in the way of the true efforts
of the people, of their friendly co-operation, their
discovery of all that they could achieve for their own
happiness and prosperity, if they acted together in their
free self-helping groups. Let us never forget the
power of the accumulated pence. If we could per
suade a million men and women to lay aside one half
penny a week, at the end of a year they would have
over £100,000 to invest in farms, houses, recreation
grounds, in all that they felt they most needed. With
the acquisition of property would come many of the
helpful and useful qualities — the self-confidence, the
faculty of working together, and of managing property,
and the proud inspiring ambition to remake in peaceful
ways, unstained by any kind of violence, and therefore
challenging and encountering no opposing forces, the
whole condition of society, as it exists to-day. Such is
the goal to which we, who disbelieve in force, must ever
point the way. It is for us to show that everything can
be gained by voluntary effort and combination, and
nothing can be permanently and securely gained by
force. In every form, where men hold men in sub
jection to themselves, force is always organized against
itself, is always tending sooner or later to destroy itself.
Autocrat, restless politician, or Socialist, they are all
only labourers in vain. There is a moral gravitation
that in its own time drags all their work remorsely to
the ground. Everywhere, across that work, failure is
written large. There are many reasons. In the first

52 MR. SPENCER AND

place, force begets force, and dies by the hand of its
own offspring; then those who use force never act long
together, for the force-temper leads them to turn their
hand against each other; then the continued use of
force, as is natural, develops a superhuman stupidity,
a failure to see the real meaning and drift of things, in
thos who use it ; but greatest of all reasons, the soul of
man is made for freedom, and only in freedom finds its
true life and development. So long as we suppress
that true life of the soul, so long as we deny to it the
full measure of its freedom, we shall continue to strive
and to quarrel and to hate, and to waste our efforts, as
we have done through so many countless years, and
shall never enter the fruitful path of peace and friend
ship that waits for us. Once show the people, make it
clear to their heart and understanding, that it is liberty
alone that can lead us into this blessed path of peace
and friendship ; that it alone can still the strife and the
hatreds; that it alone is the instrument of progress of
every kind ; that it alone in any true sense can make
and hold together and preserve a nation — which, if it
rejects liberty, must in the end tear itself to pieces in
the great hopeless aimless strife — once show them this
supreme truth, feeling it yourself in the very depths of
your heart, and so speak to them — and then you will
find, as you touch the nobler, more generous part of
their nature, that gradually, under the influence of the
truer teaching, they will learn to throw aside the false
bribes and mischievous attractions of power, and to turn
away in disgust from that mad destructive game in
which they and we alike have allowed ourselves for
a time to be entangled. It is not the Socialist party, it
is not any of the Labour parties who have done the
most to lead astray the people, and to teach them to

THE GREAT MACHINE 53

believe that political power is the rightful instrument for
securing all that their heart desires. These extreme
parties have simply trodden more boldly the path in
which we went before them. They have only been the
pupils — the too apt pupils — in our school, who have
bettered our own teaching. It is we, the richer classes,
who in our love of power, our desire to win the great
game, have done the great wrong, have misled and
corrupted the people ; and the fault and the blame and
the shame will rest in the largest measure with us,
when the evil fruit grows from the seed that we so
recklessly planted. When the chickens come home to
roost, we shall only have to say, as so many have said
before us — tu Fas voulu, Georges Dandin. Let us then,
who have made the great mistake, let us try to redeem
it ; let us show the people that there is a nobler, happier
form of life than to live as two scrambling, quarrelling
crowds, mad for their own immediate interests, void of
all scruple or restraint. Let us shake ourselves free
from this miserable party fighting ; let us speak only in
the name of the great rights, the great all-guiding, ever-
enduring principles ; let us oppose the power of some
men over other men, as a thing that is in itself morally
untrue, untrue from every higher point of view, that is
lese-majeste as regards all the best and noblest con
ceptions of what we are — beings gifted with free
responsible souls — as the source of hopeless confusion
and scramble and injustice; and let us steadfastly set
our faces towards the one great ideal of making a nation,
in which all men and women will love their own liberty
— without which life is as salt that has lost its savour,
and is only fit to be cast away — as deeply as the}'
respect and seek to preserve the liberty of others.
A few words to prevent a possible misunderstanding.

54 MR. SPENCER AND

I have not been preaching any form of Anarchy, which
seems to me — even in its most peaceful and reasonable
forms — quite apart from the detestable bomb — merely
one more creed of force (I am not referring here to
such a form of Anarchy — passive resistance under all
circumstances— as Tolstoy preaches, into the consider
ation of which I cannot enter to-day). Anarchy is a
creed, which, as I believe, we can never rightly class
among the creeds of liberty. Only in condemning
Anarchy we shall do well to remember that, like Social
ism, it is the direct product, the true child of those
systems of government that have taught men to believe
that they may rightly found their relations to each other
on the employment of force. Both the Anarchist and
the Socialist find some measure of justification in the
practice and teaching of all our modern governments,
for if force is a right thing in itself, then it becomes
merely a secondary question — on which we may all
differ— as to the quantity and quality of it to be em
ployed, the purposes for which we may use it, or in
what hands the employment of it should be placed.
There is, there can be, nothing sacred in the division of
ourselves into majorities and minorities. You may think
right to take only half a man's property from him by
force ; I may prefer to take the whole. You may think
right to entrust the use of force to every three men out
of five; I may prefer to entrust it — as the Anarchist
does— to each one of the five separately ; or as some
Russians and some Germans do, to the autocrat or half-
autocrat, and his all-embracing bureaucracy. Who
shall decide between us? There is no moral tribunal
before which you can summon unlimited power, for it
acknowledges, as we have seen, nothing higher than
itself; if it did acknowledge any moral law above itself,

THE GREAT MACHINE 55

its wings would be clipped, and its nature changed, and
it would no longer be unlimited.

Now glance for a moment at the true character of
Anarchy, and see why we must refuse to class it among
the creeds of liberty, though many of the reasonable
Anarchists are inspired, as I believe, by a real love of
liberty. Under Anarchy, if there were 5,000,000 men
and women in a country, there would be 5,000,000 little
governments, each acting in its own case as council,
witness, judge, and executioner. That would be simply
a carnival, a pandemonium of force; and hardly an
improvement even upon our power-loving, force-using
governments. Force, as I believe, with Mr. Spencer,
must rest, not in the hands of the individual, but in the
hands of a government — not to be, as at present, an
instrument of subjecting the two men to the three men,
not to be exalted into the supreme thing, lifted up above
the will and conscience of the individual, judging all
things in the light of its own interests, but strictly as the
agent, the humble servant of universal liberty, with its
simple duties plainly, definitely, distinctly marked out
for it. Our great purpose is to get rid of force, to
banish it wholly from our dealings with each other, to
give it notice to quit from this changed world of ours ;
but as long as some men — like Bill Sykes and all his
tribe — are willing to make use of it for their own ends,
or to make use of fraud, which is only force in disguise,
wearing a mask, and evading our consent, just as force
with violence openly disregards it — so long we must use
force to restrain force. That is the one and only one
rightful employment of force — force in the defence of
the plain simple rights of liberty, of the exercise of
faculties, and therefore of the rights of property, public
or private, in a word of all the rights of self-ownership

56 THE GREAT MACHINE

— force used defensively against force used aggressively.
The only true use of force is for the destruction, the
annihilation of itself, to rid the world of its own mischief-
making existence. Even when used defensively, it still
remains an evil, only to be tolerated in order to get rid
of the greater evil. It is the one thing in the world to be
bound down with chains, to be treated as a slave, and
only as a slave, that must always act under command of
something better and higher than itself. Wherever and
whenever we use it, we must surround it with the most
stringent limits, looking on it, as we should look on a
wild and dangerous beast, to which we deny all will and
free movement of its own. It is one of the few things
in our world to which liberty must be for ever denied.
Within those limits the force, that keeps a clear and
open field for every effort and enterprise of human
activity— that are in themselves untainted by force and
fraud — such force is in our present world a necessary
and useful servant, like the fire which burns in the
fireplaces of our rooms and the ranges of our kitchen ;
force, which once it passes beyond that purely defensive
office, becomes our worst, our most dangerous enemy,
like the fire which escapes from our fireplaces and takes
its own wild course. If then we are wise and clear-
seeing, we shall keep the fire in the fireplace, and never
allow it to pass away from our control.

A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM

WE, who call ourselves Voluntaryists, appeal to you
to free yourselves from these many systems of State
force, which are rendering impossible the true and the
happy life of the nations of to-day. This ceaseless
effort to compel each other, in turn for each new object
that is clamoured for by this or that set of politicians,
this ceaseless effort to bind chains round the hands of
each other, is preventing progress of the real kind, is
preventing peace and friendship and brotherhood, and
is turning the men of the same nation, who ought to
labour happily together for common ends, in their own
groups, in their own free unfettered fashion, into
enemies, who live conspiring against and dreading,
often hating each other.

Look at the picture that you may see to-day in every
country of Europe. Nations divided into two or three
parties, which are again divided into several groups,
facing each other like hostile armies, each party intent
on humbling and conquering its rivals, on treading
them under their feet, as a conquering nation crushes
and tramples on the nation it has conquered. What
good, what happiness, what permanent progress of the
true kind can come out of that unnatural, denational
izing, miserable warfare? Why should you desire to
compel others ; why should you seek to have power —
that evil, bitter, mocking thing, which has been from of
old, as it is to-day, the sorrow and curse of the world —

E

58 A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM

over your fellow men and fellow women ? Why should
you desire to take from any man or woman their
own will and intelligence, their free choice, their own
self-guidance, their inalienable rights over themselves ;
why should you desire to make of them mere tools and
instruments for your own advantage and interest ; why
should you desire to compel them to serve and follow
your opinions instead of their own ; why should you
deny in them the soul — that suffers so deeply from all
constraint — and treat them as a sheet of blank paper
upon which you may write your own will and desires,
of whatever kind they may happen to be ? Who gave
you the right, from where do you pretend to have
received it, to degrade other men and women from
their own true rank as human beings, taking from them
their will, their conscience, and intelligence — in a word,
all the best and highest part of their nature — turning
them into mere empty worthless shells, mere shadows
of the true man and woman, mere counters in the game
you are mad enough to play ; and just because you are
more numerous or stronger than they, to treat them as
if they belonged not to themselves, but to you ? Can
you believe that good will ever come by morally and
spiritually degrading your fellow men? What happy
and safe and permanent form of society can you hope
to build on this pitiful plan of subjecting others, or
being yourselves subjected by them ?

We show you the better way. We ask you to
renounce this old, weary, hopeless way of force, ever
tear-stained and blood-stained, which has gone on so
long under Emperors and autocrats and governing
classes, and still goes on to-day amongst those who, whilst
they condemn Emperors and autocrats, continue to
walk in their footsteps, and understand and love liberty

A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM 59

very little more than those old rulers of an old world.
We bid you ask yourselves—' What is all our boasted
civilization and gain in knowledge worth to us, if we
are still, like those who had not attained to our civili
zation and knowledge, to hunger for power, still to
cling to the ways of strife and bitterness and hatred,
still to oppress each other as in the days of the old
rulers?' Don't be deceived by mere words and phrases.
Don't think that everything was gained when you got
rid of autocrat and emperor. Don't think that a change
in the mere form — without change in the spirit of men
— can really alter anything, or make a new world.
A voting majority, that still believes in force, that still
believes in crushing and ruling a minority, can be just
as tyrannous, as selfish and blind, as any of the old
rulers. Happy the nation that escapes from autocrat,
from emperor, and from its bureaucratic tyrants; but
that is only the beginning of the new good life ; that
counts only for the first steps in the true path. When
that is done, the true goal has still to be won, the great
lesson still remains to be learnt. The old curse, the
old sorrow, did not simply lie in the heart of autocrat
and emperor; it lay in the common desire of men to
rule and possess for their own advantage the minds
and bodies of each other. It is that fatal, deluding
desire which even yet to-day prevents our realizing the
true and happy life. As a writer has well said— many
nations have been powerful, but has any one of them
found the true life— as yet ? It is this vainest of all vain
desires that we have to renounce, trample upon, cast
clean out of our hearts, if we are to win the better
things. We have to learn that our systems of force
destroy all the great human hopes and possibilities;
that as long as we believe in force there can be no

60 A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM

abiding peace or friendship between us all ; that a half
disguised civil war will for ever smoulder in our midst ;
that each half of the nation must live, as it were, sword
in hand, ever watching the other half, and given up, as
we said, to suspicion and dread and hatred, knowing
that, if once defeated in the great contest, its own
deepest beliefs and interests will be roughly set aside
and trampled on ; that it must accept the hard lot of
the conquered, kneeling down in the dust and sub
mitting to whatever its opponents choose to decree for
it ; that it will have no rights of its own ; no rights over
its own life, over its own actions and property; no
share in the common country, no share in the guidance
of its fortunes ; no voice in the laws passed ; it will be
a mere helpless crowd, defranchized, and decitizenized,
a degraded and subject race, bound to do the hard
bidding of its conquerors. Can you for a single
moment believe that the subjecting of others in this
conqueror's and conquered fashion is the true end of
our existence here, the true fulfilling of man's nature,
with all its great gifts and hopes and aspirations ?

And are the conquerors in the great conflict better
off— if we try to see clearly— than the conquered? We
can only answer — No ; for power is one of the worst,
the most fatal and demoralizing of all gifts you can
place in the hands of men. He who has power — power
only limited by his own desires — misunderstands both
himself and the world in which he lives; he sees
through a glass darkly, which dims and perverts his
whole vision; he magnifies and exalts his own little
self; he fondly imagines he may follow the lusts of his
heart wherever they lead him ; and disowns the control
of the great principles, that stand for ever above us
all, and refuses, alike to the autocrat and the voting

A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM 61

majority, the rule and the subjecting of the lives of
others. If we feel shame and sorrow for those who are
subjected, we may feel yet more shame and sorrow for
the blind, self-deceiving instruments oi their subjection.
They in their pride sink to a lower depth than those
whom they subject. Better it were to be amongst
those who wear the chain than amongst those who
bind it on the hands of other men. For those who
suffer in subjection there is some hope, some glimmer
ing of light, some teachings that come from the
passionate desire for the liberty denied to them ; but
for those who cling to and believe in possessing power
there is only darkness of soul, where no light enters,
until at last, through a long bitter experience, they learn
how that for which they sacrificed so much has only
turned to their own deepest injury. See how power
hardens and brutalizes all of us. It not only makes
us selfish, unscrupulous, and intriguing, scornful and
intolerant, corrupt in our motives, but it veils our eyes
and takes from us the gift of seeing and understanding.
Power and stupidity are for ever wedded together.
Cunning there may be ; but it is a cunning that in the
end tricks and deceives itself. Power for ever tends
not only to develop in us the knave, but also to develop
the fool. If you wish to know how power spoils
character and narrows intelligence, look at the great
military empires; their steady perseverance in the
roads that lead to ruin ; their dread of free thought and
of liberty in all its forms ; look at the sharp repressions,
the excessive punishments, the love of secrecy, the
attempt to drill a whole nation into obedience, and to
use the drilled and subject thing for every passing
vanity and aggrandizement of those who govern. Look
also at the great administrative systems. See how men

62 A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM

become under them helpless and dispirited, incapable
of free effort and self-protection, at one moment sunk
in apathy, at another moment ready for revolution. Do
you wonder that it is so? Is it wonderful that when
you replace the will and intelligence and self-guidance
of the individual by systems of vast machinery, that
men should gradually lose all the better and higher
parts of their nature — for of what use to them is that
better and higher part, when they may not exercise it ?
Ought we to feel surprise, when we see them become
like over-restrained children, peevish, discontented and
quarrelsome, unable to control and direct themselves,
and ever loud in their complaints that enough cake and
jam do not fall to their share ?

Endless are the evils that power brings with it, both
to those who rule and are ruled. If you hold power,
your first aim and end are necessarily to preserve that
power. With power, as you fondly imagine, you possess
all that the world has to offer ; without power you seem
to yourself only portionless, abject, humiliated — the gate
flung in your face, that leads to the palace of all the
desirable things. When you once play for so vast
a stake, what influence can mere right or wrong have in
your counsels ? The course that lies before you may
be right or wrong, tolerant or intolerant, wise or foolish,
but the fatal gift of power, that you have been mad
enough to desire and to grasp at, gives you no choice.
If you mean to have and to hold power, you must do
whatever is necessary for the having and holding of it.
You may have doubts and hesitations and scruples, but
power is the hardest of all taskmasters, and you must
either lay these aside, when you once stand on that
dangerous, dizzy height, or yield your place to others,
and renounce your part in the great conflict. And when

A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM 63

power is won, don't suppose that you are a free man,
able to choose your path and do as you like. From the
moment you possess power, you are but its slave, fast
bound by its many tyrant necessities. The slave-owner
has no freedom ; he can never be anything but a slave
himself, and share in the slavery that he makes for
others. It is, I think, plain it must be so. Power once
gained, you must anxiously day by day watch over
its security, whatever its security costs, to prevent the
slippery thing escaping from your hands. You tremble
at every shadow that threatens its existence. You are
haunted by a thousand dreads and suspicions. It
becomes, whether you wish it or not, your first, your
highest law, and all other things fall into the second and
third place. Once you plunge into this all-absorbing-
game of striving for power, you must go where the
strong tide carries you ; you must put away conscience
and sense of right, and play the whole game relentlessly
out, with the unflinching determination to win what you
are striving for. In that great game there is no room
left for inconvenient and embarrassing scruples. You
can't afford to let your opponents defeat you and wrest
the power that you hold from your hands. You can't
afford to let them become your masters and trample, as
conquerors, upon all the rights and beliefs that are
sacred to you. Whatever the price to pay, whatever
sacrifice it demands of what is just and upright and
honourable, you must harden your heart, and go on to
the bitter end. And thus it is that seeking for power
not only means strife and hatred, the splitting of a nation
into hostile factions, but for ever breeds trick and
intrigue and falsehood, results in the wholesale buying
of men, the offering of this or that unworthy bribe,
the playing with passions, the poor unworthy trade

64 A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM

of the bitter unscrupulous tongue, that heaps every
kind of abuse, deserved or not deserved, upon those
who are opposed to you, that exaggerates their every
fault, mistake, and weakness, that caricatures, perverts
their words and actions, and claims in childish and
absurd fashion that what is good is only to be found in
your half of the nation, and what is evil is only to
be found in the other half.

Such are the fruits of the strife for power. Evil they
must be, because power is evil in itself. How can
the taking away from a man his intelligence, his will,
his self-guidance be anything but evil? If it were
not evil in itself, there would be no meaning in the
higher part of nature, there would be no guidance
in the great principles — for power, if we once acknow
ledge it, must stand above everything else, and cannot
admit of any rivals. If the power of some and the
subjection of others are right, then men would exist
merely as the dust to be trodden under the feet of
each other ; the autocrats, the emperors, the military
empires, the Socialist, perhaps even the Anarchist with
his detestable bomb, would each and all be in their own
right, and find their own justification ; and we should
live in a world of perpetual warfare, that some devil, as
we might reasonably believe, must have planned for us.
To those of us who believe in the soul — and on that
great matter we who sign hold different opinions— the
freedom of the individual is not simply a question of
politics, but it is a religious question of the deepest
meaning. The soul to us is by its own nature a free
thing, living its life here in order that it may learn
to distinguish and choose between the good and the
evil, to find its own way — whatever stages of existence
may have to be passed through— towards the perfecting

A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM 65

of itself. You may not then, either for the sake of
advancing your own interests, or for the sake of helping
any cause, however great and desirable in itself, in
which you believe, place bonds on the souls of other
men and women, and take from them any part of
their freedom. You may not take away the free life,
putting in its place the bound life. Religion that is not
based on freedom, that allows any form of servitude
of men to men, is to us only an empty and mocking
word, for religion means following our own personal
sense of right and fulfilling the commands of duty,
as we each can most truly read it, not with the hands
tied and the eyes blinded, but with the free, un
constrained heart that chooses for itself. And see
clearly that you cannot divide men up into separate
parts — into social, political and religious beings. It is all
one. All parts of our nature are joined in one great
unity; and you cannot therefore make men politically
subject without injuring their souls. Those who strive to
increase the power of men over men, and who thus create
the habit of mechanical obedience, turning men into
mere State creatures, over whose heads laws of all kinds
are passed, are striking at the very roots of religion,
which becomes but a lifeless, meaningless thing, sinking
gradually into a matter of forms and ceremonies, when
ever the soul loses its freedom. Many men recognize
this truth, if not in words, yet in their hearts, for all
religions of the higher kind tend to become intensely
personal, resting upon that free spiritual relation with
the great Over-soul — a relation that each must interpret
for himself. And remember you can't have two opposed
powers of equal authority ; you can't serve two masters.
Either the religious conscience and sense of right must
stand in the first place, and the commands of all govern-

66 A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM

ing authorities in the second place; or the State
machine must stand first, and the religious and moral
conscience of men must follow after in humble sub
jection, and do what the State orders. If you make the
State supreme, why should it pay heed to the rule of
conscience, or the individual sense of right ; why should
the master listen to the servant? If it is supreme,
let it plainly say so, take its own way, and pay no heed,
as so many rulers before them have refused to do, to the
conscience of those they rule.

And here we ought to say that amongst those who
sign this appeal are some who, like the late Mr. Bradlaugh
— a devoted fighter for liberty — reject the doctrine of
soul and would not, therefore, base their resistance to
State power on any religious ground. But apart from
this great difference that may exist between us, we, who
sign, are united by the same detestation of State
power, and by the same perception of the evils that flow
from it. We both see alike that placing unlimited
power— as we do now— in the hands of the State means
degrading men from their true rank, the narrowing
of their intelligence, the encouragement of intolerance
and contempt for each other, and therefore the en
couragement of sullen, bitter strife, the tricks of the
clever tongue, practised on both the poor and rich
crowd, and the evil arts of flattery and self-abasement in
order to conciliate votes and possess power, the excessive
and dangerous power of a very able press, which keeps
parties together, and too often thinks for most of us, the
repression of all those healthy individual differences
that make the life and vigour of a nation, the blind
following of blind leaders, the reckless rushing into
national follies, like the unnecessary Boer War — that
might have been avoided, as many of us believe, with

A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM 67

a moderate amount of prudence, patience and good
temper— just because the individuals of the nation have
lost the habit of thinking and acting for themselves,
have lost control over their own actions, and are bound
together by party-ties into two great child-like crowds ;
means also the piling up of intolerable burdens of debt
and taxation, the constant and rather mean endeavour to
place the heaviest of these burdens on others — whoever
the others may be, the carelessness, the high-handedness,
the insolence of those who spend money compulsorily
taken, the flocking together of the evil vultures of many
kinds where the feast is spread, the deep poisonous cor
ruption, such as is written in broad characters over the
government of some of the large towns in the United
States — a country bound to us by so many ties of friend
ship and affection, and in which there is so much to admire
—a corruption, that in a lesser degree has soiled the
reputation of some of the large cities of the Continent,
and is already to be found here and there sporadically
existing amongst us in our own country; and which
only too surely means at the end of it all the setting up
of some absolute form of government, to which men fly
in their despair, as a refuge from the intolerable evils
they have brought upon themselves — a refuge that after
a short while is found to be wholly useless and impotent,
and is then violently broken up, perhaps amidst storm
and bloodshed, to be once more succeeded by the long
train of returning evils, from which men had sought to
escape in the vain hope that more power would heal the
evils that power had brought upon them.

Such are the fruits of power and the strife for power.
It must be so. Set men up to rule their fellow men, to
treat them as mere soulless material with which they
may deal as they please, and the consequence is that

F 2

68 A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM

you sweep away every moral landmark and turn this
world into a place of selfish striving, hopeless confusion,
trickery and violence, a mere scrambling-ground for the
strongest or the most cunning or the most numerous.
Once more we repeat — don't be deluded by the careless
everyday talk about majorities. The vote of a majority
is a far lesser evil than the edict of an autocrat, for you
can appeal to a majority to repent of its sins and to undo
its mistakes, but numbers— though they were as the
grains of sand on the seashore — cannot take away the
rights of a single individual, cannot turn man or woman
into stuff for the politician to play with, or over-rule the
great principles which mark out our relations to each
other. These principles are rooted in the very nature
of our being, and have nothing to do with minorities and
majorities. Arithmetic is a very excellent thing in its
place, but it can neither give nor take away rights. Be
cause you can collect three men on one side, and only
two on the other side, that can offer no reason— no
shadow of a reason — why the three men should dispose
of the lives and property of the two men, should settle
for them what they are to do, and what they are to be :
that mere rule of numbers can never justify the turning
of the two men into slaves, and the three men into slave
owners. There is one and only one principle, on which
you can build a true, rightful, enduring and progressive
civilization, which can give peace and friendliness and
contentment to all differing groups and sects into which
we are divided — and that principle is that every man
and woman should be held by us all sacredly and
religiously to be the one true owner of his or her
faculties, of his or her body and mind, and of all proper
ty, inherited or — honestly acquired. There is no other
possible foundation — seek it wherever you will— on

A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM 69

which you can build, if you honestly mean to make this
world a place of peace and friendship, where progress of
every kind, like a full river fed by its many streams, may
flow on its happy fertilizing course, with ever broadening
and deepening volume. Deny that principle, and we
become at once like travellers who leave the one sure
and beaten path and wander hopelessly in a trackless
desert. Deny that self-ownership, that self-guidance of
the individual, and however fine our professed motives
may be, we must sooner or later, in a world without
rights, become like the animals, that prey on each other.
Deny human rights, and however little you may wish
to do so, you will find yourself abjectly kneeling at the
feet of that old-world god Force— that grimmest and
ugliest of gods that men have ever carved for themselves
out of the lusts of their hearts ; you will find yourselves
hating and dreading all other men who differ from you ;
you will find yourselves obliged by the law of the con
flict into which you have plunged, to use every means
in your power to crush them before they are able to
crush you ; you will find yourselves day by day growing
more unscrupulous and intolerant, more and more com
pelled by the fear of those opposed to you, to commit
harsh and violent actions, of which you would once
have said ' Is thy servant a dog that he should do these
things ? ' ; you will find yourselves clinging to and
welcoming Force, as the one and only form of protection
left to you, when you have once destroyed the rule of
the great principles. When once you have plunged
into the strife for power, it is the fear of those who are
seeking for power over you that so easily persuades to
all the great crimes. Who shall count up the evil brood
that is born from power — the pitiful fear, the madness,
the despair, the overpowering craving for revenge, the

7o A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM

treachery, the unmeasured cruelty ? It is liberty alone,
broad as the sky above our heads, and planted deep and
strong as the great mountains, that "allows the better
and higher part of our nature to rule in us, and subdues
those passions that we share with the animals.

We ask you then to limit and restrain power, as you
would restrain a wild and dangerous beast. Make
everything subservient to liberty ; use State force only
for one purpose— to prevent and restrain the use offeree
amongst ourselves, and that which may be described as
the twin-brother of force, wearing a mask over its
features, the fraud, which by cunning sets aside the
consent of the individual, as force sets it aside openly and
violently. Restrain by simple and efficient machinery
the force and fraud that some men are always ready to
employ against other men, for whether it is the State
that employs force against a part of the citizens, or one
citizen who employs force or fraud against another
citizen, in both cases it is equally an aggression upon the
rights, upon the self-ownership of the individual ; it is
equally in both cases the act of the stronger who in
virtue of his strength preys upon the weaker. Safe
guard therefore the lives and the property of every
citizen against the force or the cunning of Bill Sykes
and all his tribe. Make of our world a fair open field
where we may all act, according to our own choice,
individually, or in co-operation, for every unaggressive
purpose, and where good of every kind will fight its own
open unrestrained fight with evil of every kind. Don't
believe in suppressing by force any form of evil — always
excepting the direct attacks upon person and property.
An evil suppressed by force is only driven out of sight
under the surface— there to fester in safety and to take
new and more dangerous forms. Remember that

A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM 71

striking story of the German liberals, when Bismarck
had directed his foolish and useless weapon of repressive
laws against the Socialists. ' You have driven the
Socialists into silence ' — they said — ' you have forbidden
their meetings and confiscated their papers ; yet for all
that the movement goes on more actively than ever
underground and hidden from sight. And we who are
opposed to Socialism are also silenced. We have now
no enemy to attack. The enemy has vanished out of
our sight and out of our reach. How can we answer or
reason with those who speak and write no word in
public, and only teach and make new recruits in secret
and in the dark ? '

So it is always. You strike blindly, like a child in its
passion, with your weapons of force, at some vice, at
some social habit, at some teaching you consider danger
ous, and you disarm your own friends who would fight
your battle for you — were they allowed to do so — in the
one true way of discussion and persuasion and example.
You prevent discussion, and the expression of all
healthier opinion, you disarm the reformers and paralyse
their energies — the reformers who, if left to themselves,
would strive to move the minds of men, and to win their
hearts, but who now resign themselves to sleep and to
indifference, fondly believing that you with your force
have fought and won their battle for them, and that
nothing now remains for them to do. But in truth you
have done nothing ; you have helped the enemy. You
may have made the outside of things more respectable
to the careless eye, you may have taught men to believe
in the things that seem, and in reality are not ; but you
have left the poisonous sore underneath to work its own
evil undisturbed, in its own way and measure. The evil,
whatever it was, was the result of perverted intelligence

72 A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM

or perverted nature; and your systems of force have
left that intelligence and that nature unchanged ; and
you have done that most dangerous of all things — you
have strengthened the general belief in the rightfulness
and usefulness of employing force. Do you not see
that of all weapons that men can take into their
hands force is the vainest, the weakest ? In the long
dark history of the world, what real, what permanent
good has ever come from the force which men have
never hesitated to use against each other? By force
the great empires have been built up, only in due time
to be broken into pieces, and to leave mere ruins of
stones to tell their story. By force the rulers have
compelled nations to accept a religion — only in the end
to provoke that revolt of men's minds which always in
in its own time sweeps away the work of the sword, of
the hangman and the torture-table. What persecution
has in the end altered the course of human belief?
What army, used for ambitious and aggressive purposes,
has not at last become as a broken tool ? What claim of
a Church to exercise authority and to own the souls of
men has not destroyed its own influence and brought
certain decay on itself? Is it not the same to-day, as it
has been in all the centuries of the past ? Has not the
real prosperity, the happiness, the peace of a nation
increased just in proportion as it has broken all the
bonds and disabilities that impeded its life, just in pro
portion as it has let liberty replace force; just in
proportion as it has chosen and established for itself all
rights of opinion, of meeting, of discussion, rights of
free trade, rights of the free use of faculties, rights of self-
ownership as against the wrongs of subjection? And
do you think that these new bonds and restrictions in
which the nations of to-day have allowed themselves to

A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM 73

be entangled — the conscription which sends men out to
fight, consenting or not consenting, which treats them
as any other war-material, as the guns and the rifles
dispatched in batches to do their work ; or the great
systems of taxation, which make of the individual mere
tax-material, as conscription makes of him mere war-
material ; or the great systems of compulsory education,
under which the State on its own unavowed interest
tries to exert more and more of its own influence and
authority over the minds of the children, tries — as we
see specially in other countries — to mould and to shape
those young minds for its own ends — 'Something of
religion will be useful — school-made patriotism will be
useful — drilling will be useful' — so preparing from the
start docile and obedient State-material, ready made for
taxation, ready made for conscription — ready made for
the ambitious aims and ends of the rulers— do you think
that any of these modern systems, though they are more
veiled, more subtle, less frank and brutal than the
systems of the older governments, though the poison in
them is more thickly smeared with the coating of sugar,
will bear different fruit, will work less evil amongst us
all, will endure longer than those other broken and
discredited attempts, which men again and again in
their madness and presumption have made to possess
themselves of and to rule the bodies and minds of others ?
No ! one and all they belong to the same evil family ;
they are all part of the same conspiracy against the true
greatness of human nature ; they are all marked broad
across the forehead with the same old curse ; and they
will all end in the same shameful and sorrowful ending.
Over us all is the great unchanging law, ever the same,
unchanged and unchanging, regardless of all our follies
and delusions, that come and go, that we are not to

74 A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM

take possession of and rule the body and mind of others ;
that we are not to take away from our fellow-beings
their own intelligence, their own choice, their own
conscience and free will ; that we are not to allow any
ruler, be it autocrat, emperor, parliament, or voting
crowd, to take from any human being his own true rank,
making of him the degraded State-material that others
use for their own purposes.

' But ' — some of your friends may say — ( look well at
the advantages of this State-force. See how many
good things come to you by taking money out of the
pockets of others. Would the rich man continue to
serve your needs, if you had not got your hands upon
him, and held him powerless under your taxation
system? No! He would be only too glad to find an
escape from it. Keep then your close grips upon him,
now that you once hold him in it; and by more and
more skilful and searching measures relieve him ot
what you want so much, and what is merely super
fluous to him. Why spare your beast of burden?
What is the use of your numbers, of your organiza
tions, of the all-powerful vote, that can alone equalize
conditions, making the poor man rich, and the rich man
poor, if you are tempted to lay the useful weapon of
force aside? Force in the old days was used against
you; it is your turn now to use force, and spare not.
Think well of what the vote can do for you. There
lies the true magician's wand. You want pensions,
provision for old age and sickness, land, houses, a
minimum wage, lots and lots of education, breakfast
and dinner for the children who go to school, scholar
ships for the clever pupils, libraries, museums, public
halls, national operas, amusements and recreations of all
kinds, and many another good thing which you will

A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM 75

easily enough discover when you once begin to help
yourselves — for, as the French say, the appetite comes
with the eating ; and there stand the richer classes with
their laden pockets, only encumbered with the wealth
that, if they knew it, they would be better without,
defenceless, comparatively few and weak, with no
power to stand against the resistless vote, if you once
turn your strength to good account and learn how to
organize your numbers for the great victory. Of course
they will give you excellent reasons why you should
keep your hands off them, and let them go free. Don't
be fooled any longer by mere words. Force rules
everything in this world ; and to-day it is at last your
turn to use force, and enter into possession of all that
the world has to offer. '

We answer — that all such language is the language
of passionate unthinking children, who, regardless of
right or wrong, with no questions of conscience, no
perception of consequences, snatch at the first glittering
thing that they see before them ; that those who once
listen to these counsels of violence would be changed
in their nature from the reasonable man to the
unreasonable beast ; that all such counsels mean revolt
against the great principles, against the honest and true
methods that alone can redeem this world of ours, that,
if faithfully followed, will in the end make a society
happy, prosperous and progressive in its every part,
ever levelling up, ever peacefully redistributing wealth,
ever turning the waste places of life into the fruitful
garden. But in violence and force there is no
redemption. Force— whether disguised or not under
the forms of voting — has but one meaning. It means
universal confusion and strife, it means flinging the
sword — that has never yet helped any of us — into the

76 A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM

scale and preparing the way for the utterly wasted and
useless shedding of much blood. Even if these good
things, and many more of the same kind, lay within
your grasp, waiting for your hand to close upon them,
you have no right to take them by force, no right to
make war upon any part of your fellow citizens, and to
treat them as mere material to serve your interests.
The rich man may no more be the beast of burden of
the poor man, than the poor may be the beast of burden
of the rich. Force rests on no moral foundations ; you
cannot justify it ; it rests on no moral basis ; you cannot
reconcile it with reason and conscience and the higher
nature of men. It lies apart in its own evil sphere,
separated by the deepest gulf from all that makes for
the real good of life— a mere devil's instrument. Even
if force to-morrow could lay at your feet all the material
gifts which you rightly desire, you may not, you dare
not, for the sake of the greater good, for the sake of the
higher nature that is in all of us, for the sake of the
great purposes and the nobler meanings of life, accept
what it offers. Our work is to make this life of ours
prosperous, happy and beautiful for all who share in
it, working with the instruments of liberty, of peace,
and of friendship — these and these only are the
instruments which we may rightly take in our hands,
these are the only instruments that can do our work
for us.

Those who bid you use force are merely using
language of the same kind as every blood-stained ruler
has used in the past, the language of those who paid
their troops by pillage, the language of the war-loving
German general, who in old days looked down from
the heights surrounding Paris, and whispered with
a gentle sigh— ( What a city to sack ! ' It is the language

A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM 77

of those who through all the past history of the world
have believed in the right of conquering, in the right
of making slaves, who have set up force as their god,
who have tried to do by the violent hand whatever
smiled to their own desires, and who only brought
curses upon themselves, and a deluge of blood and
tears upon the world. Force — whatever forms it takes
—can do nothing for you. It can redeem nothing; it
can give you nothing that is worth the having, nothing
that will endure ; it cannot even give you material
prosperity. There is no salvation for you or for any
living man to be won by the force that narrows rights,
and always leaves men lower and more brutal in
character than it found them. It is, and ever has been
the evil genius of our race. It calls out the reckless,
violent, cruel part of our nature, it wastes precious
human effort in setting men to strive one against the
other; it turns us into mere fighting animals; and
ends, when men at last become sick of the useless
strife and universal confusion, in ' the man on the black
horse ' who calls himself and is greeted as ' the saviour
of society'. Make the truer, the nobler choice. Resist
the blind and sordid appeal to your interests of the
moment, and take your place once and for good on the
side of the true liberty, that calls out all the better and
higher part of our nature, and knows no difference
between rulers and ruled, majorities and minorities,
rich and poor. Declare once and for good that all men
and women are the only true owners of their faculties, of
their mind and body, of the property that belongs to
them ; that you will only build the new society on the
one true foundation of self-ownership, self-rule, and
self-guidance ; that you turn away from and renounce
utterly all this mischievous, foolish and corrupt business

78 A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM

of compelling each other, of placing burdens upon each
other, of making force, and the hateful trickery that
always goes with it, into our guiding principles, of
treating first one set of men and then another set of
men as beasts of burden, whose lot in life it is to serve
the purposes of others. True it is that there are many
and many things good in themselves which you do not yet
possess, and which you rightly desire, things which the
believers in force are generous enough to offer you in
any profusion at the expense of others; but they are
merely cheating you with vain hopes, dangling before
your eyes the mocking shows of things that can never
be. Force never yet made a nation prosperous. It
has destroyed nation after nation, but never yet built
up an enduring prosperity. It is through your own
free efforts, not through the gifts of those who have
no right to give them, that all these good things can
come to you ; for great is the essential difference
between the gift — whether rightly or wrongly given —
and the thing won by free effort. That which you
have won has made you stronger in yourselves, has
taught you to know your own power and resources, has
prepared you to win more and more victories. The
gift flung to you has left you dependent upon others,
distrustful and dispirited in yourselves. Why turn to
your governments as if you were helpless in your
selves? What power lies in a government, that does
not lie also in you ? They are only men like you — men,
in many ways disadvantaged, overweighted by the
excessive burdens they have taken on themselves,
seldom able to give concentrated attention to any one
subject, however important; necessarily much under
the influence of subordinates, from whom they must
gather the information on which they have to act;

A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM 79

often turned from their own course by the dissensions
and differences of their followers; always obliged to
plan and manoeuvre in order to keep their party
together, and then losing their own guiding purpose,
and tempted into misleading and unworthy courses;
often deciding the weightiest matters in a hurry, as in
the case of the famous 'Ten Minutes Reform Bill';
and physically leading a life which over-taxes health
and endurance with the call made upon it, by the cares
of their own office, their attendance far into the night
at the House, their social occupations, the necessity to
follow carefully all that is passing in the great theatre
of European politics, and of studying the questions
which each week brings with it. Think carefully, and
you will feel that all these rash attempts of the handful
of men, that we call a government, to nurse a nation
are a mere delusion. You can't throw the cares and
the wants and the hopes of a whole people on some
sixteen or eighteen over-burdened workers. You might
as well try to put the sea into a quart pot. A handful
of men can't either think or act for you. Their task
is impossible. If they try to do so, they can only be
as blind guides who lead blind followers into the ditch.
It all ends in scramble and confusion, in something
being done in order to have something to show, in
great expectations and woeful disappointments, in rash
action and grievous mistakes, resulting from hurry and
over-pressure and insufficient knowledge, which lead
the nation in wrong directions, and bring their long
train of evil consequences. Why place your fortunes,
all that you have, and all that you are, in other hands ?
You have in yourselves the great qualities — though still
undeveloped— for supplying in your own free groups
the growing wants of your lives. You are the children

8o A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM

of the men who did so much for themselves, the men
who broke the absolute power; who planted the
colonies of our race in distant lands, who created our
manufactures, and carried our trade to every part of
the world; who established your co-operative and
benefit societies, your Trade Unions, who built and
supported your Nonconformist Churches. In you is
the same stuff, the same power to do, as there was in
them ; and if only you let their spirit breathe again in
you, and tread in their footsteps, you may add to their
triumphs and successes tenfold and a hundredfold.
As the French well say:— *Ou les peres ont passe,
passeront bientot les enfants' (Where the fathers
passed, there soon shall the children pass). To this
point — the work to be undertaken in your own free
groups, without any compulsion and subjection of
others, we will return later.

But nothing can be well and rightly done, nothing
can bear the true fruit, until you become deeply and
devotedly in love with personal liberty, consecrating in
your hearts the great and sacred principle of self-owner
ship and self-direction. That great principle must be
our guiding star through the whole of this life's pilgrim
age. Away from its guiding we shall only continue to
wander, as of old, hopelessly in the wilderness. For its
sake we must be ready to make any and every sacrifice.
It is worth them all — many times worth them all. For
its sake you must steadily refuse all the glittering gifts
and bribes which many politicians of both parties
eagerly press upon you, if you will but accept them as
your leaders, and lend them the power which your
numbers can give. Enter into none of these corrupt
and fatal compacts. All such leaders are but playing
with you, fooling you for their own ends. In the pride

A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM 81

and vanity of their hearts they wish to bind you to
them, to make you dependent upon them. You are to
fight their battles, and you will be paid in return much
in the same manner as the old leaders paid their soldiers
by giving them a conquered city to sack. Can any real
good come to you by following that unworthy and
mercenary path ? When once you have become a mere
pillaging horde, when once you have lost all guidance
and control and purpose of your own, bound to your
leaders, and dependent on them for the sake of the
spoils that they fling to you, do you think that any of
the greater and nobler things of life will still be possible
to you ? The great things are only possible for those
who keep their hearts pure and exalted, and their hands
clean, who are true to themselves, who follow and serve
the fixed principles that are above us all, and are our
only true guides, who never sell themselves into the
hands of others. Your very leaders, who have cheated
you, and used you, will despise you ; and in your own
hearts, if you dare honestly to search into them, you will
despise yourselves. But your self-contempt will hardly
help you. You will have lost the great qualities of your
nature ; the old corrupt contract, into which you have
entered, will still bind you; you may in your wild
discontent revolt against your leaders ; but as in the
legends of the evil controlling spirit, that both serves
and enslaves, you will each be a fatal necessity to the
other. You have linked your fortunes together, and it
will be hard to dissolve the partnership. Remember
ever the old words— as true to-day as when they were
first spoken — ( What shall it profit a man if he gain the
whole world, and lose his own soul ? ' If you lose all
respect for the rights of others, and with it your own
self-respect, if you lose your own sense of right and

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82 A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM

fairness, if you lose your belief in liberty, and with it the
sense of your own worth and true rank, if you lose your
own will and self-guidance and control over your own
lives and actions, what can all the buying and trafficking,
what can all the gifts of politicians give you in return ?
Why let the true diamond be taken from you in
exchange for the worthless bit of glass? Is not the
ruling of your own selves worth a hundred times this
mad attempt to rule over others ? If your house were
filled with silver and gold, would you be happy if your
own self no more belonged to you? Have you ever
carefully thought out what life would be like under the
schemes of the Socialist party, who offer us the final,
the logical completion of all systems of force ? Try to
picture the huge overweighted groaning machine of
government; the men who direct it vainly, miserably
struggling with their impossible task of managing
everything, driven for the sake of their universal system
to extinguish all differences of thought and action,
allowing no man to possess his own faculties, or to
enjoy the fruit that he has won by their exercise, to call
land or house or home his own, allowing no man to do
a day's work for another, or to sell and buy on his own
account, denying to all men the ownership and posses
sion of either body or mind, necessarily intolerant, as
the Tsar's government is intolerant, of every form of free
thought and free enterprise, trembling at the very
shadow of liberty, haunted by the perpetual terror that
the old love of self-guidance and free action might some
day again awake in the breast of men, obliged to
exercise a discipline, like that which exists in the
German army, from fear that the first beginning of
revolt might prove the destruction of the huge trembling
ill-balanced structure, with no sense of right,— right

A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM 83

a mere word that would be lost to their language — but
only the ever present, ever urgent necessities of main
taining their unstable power, which was always out of
equilibrium, always in danger, because opposed to the
essential nature of men — that unconquerable nature,
which has always broken and will always break in its
own time these systems of bondage. Picture also the
horde of countless officials, who would form a bureau
cratic, all-powerful army, vast as that which exists in
Russia, and probably as corrupt — for the same reason —
because only able to fulfil their task, if allowed to have
supreme unquestioned power; always engaged in
spying, restraining, and repressing, for ever mono
tonously repeating, as if they governed a nursery—
' Don't, you mustn't ; ' and then picture imprisoned
under the bureaucratic caste a nation of dispirited
cyphers — cyphers, who would be as peevish, discon
tented and quarrelsome as shut-up children, because
shut off by an iron fence from all the stimulating
influences of free life, and forbidden, as if it were
a crime, to exercise their faculties according to their
own interests and inclinations ; picture also the intense,
the ludicrous pettiness that would run through the
whole thing. As a French writer (Leroy Beaulieu)
wittily said — it would be a great State question, ever
recurring to trouble the safety of the trembling quaver
ing system, whether or no a wife should be allowed to
mend the trousers of her husband. Who could
exorcise and lay to rest that insoluble problem, for if
the wife were once allowed to perform this bit of useful
household duty, might not the whole wicked unsocial-
istic trade of working for others, in return for their
sixpences and shillings, come flowing back with irresist
ible force? Such is the small game that you are

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84 A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM

obliged to hunt, such are the minute pitiful necessities
to which you are obliged to stoop, when once you
construct these great State machineries, and take upon
yourself, in your amazing and ignorant presumption, to
interfere with the natural activities of human existence.

See also another truth. There are few greater
injuries that can be inflicted on you than taking out of
your hands the great services that supply your wants.
Why? Because the healing virtue that belongs to all
these great services — education, religion, the winning of
land and houses, the securing greater comfort and
refinement and amusement in your lives — lies in the
winning of these things for yourselves by your own
exertions, through your own skill, your own courage,
your friendly co-operation one with another, your
integrity in your common dealings, your unconquerable
self-reliance and confidence in your own powers of
doing. This winning, these efforts, are the great
lessons in life-long education ; that lasts from childhood
to the grave; and when learnt, they are learnt not
for yourselves alone, but for your children, and your
children's children. They are the steps and the only
steps up to the higher levels. You can't be carried to
those higher levels on the shoulders of others. The
politician is like those who boasted to have the keys of
earth and heaven in their pocket. Vainest of vain
pretences ! The keys both of heaven and earth lie in
your own pocket; it is only you — you, the free in
dividuals — who can unlock the great door. All these
great wants and services are the means by which we
acquire the great qualities which spell victory ; they are
the means by which we become raised and changed in
ourselves, and by which, as we are changed, we change
and remake all the circumstances of our lives. Each

A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM 85

victory so gained prepares the way for the next victory,
and makes that next victory the easier, for we not only
have the sense of success in our hearts, but we have
begun to acquire the qualities on which it depends. On
the other hand the more of his ready-made institutions
the politician thrusts upon you, the weaker, the more
incapable you become, just because the great qualities
are not called out and exercised. Why should they be
called out ? There is no need for them ; their practice-
ground is taken away ; and they simply lie idle, rusting,
and at last ceasing to be. Tie up your right hand for
three months and what happens ? The muscles will
have wasted, and your hand will have lost its cunning
and its force. So it is with all mental and moral
qualities. Given time enough, and a politician with his
restless scheming brain and his clumsy hands would
enfeeble and spoil a nation of the best and truest
workers. He is powerless to help you ; he can only
stand in your way, and prevent your doing.

Refuse then to put your faith in mere machinery, in
party organizations, in Acts of Parliament, in great
unwieldy systems, which treat good and bad, the
careful and the careless, the striving and the indifferent,
on the same plan, and which on account of their vast
and cumbrous size, their complexity, their official
central management, pass entirely out of your control.
Refuse to be spoon-fed, drugged and dosed, by the
politicians. They are not leading you towards the
promised land, but further and further away from it.
If the world could be saved by the men of words and
the machine-makers, it would have been saved long
ago. Nothing is easier than to make machinery; you
may have any quantity of it on order in a few months.
Nothing is easier than to appoint any number of

86 A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM

officials. Unluckily the true fight is of another and
much sterner kind ; and the victory comes of our own
climbing of the hills, not by sitting in the plain, with
folded hands, watching those others who profess to
do our business for us. Do you think it likely or
reasonable, do you think it fits in with and agrees with
your daily experience of this fighting, working world of
ours, that you could take your chair in the politician's
shop, and order across his counter so much prosperity
and progress and happiness, just as you might order
cotton goods by the piece or wheat by the quarter?
Be brave and clear-sighted, and face the stern but
wholesome truth, that it is only you, you with your
own hands, you with your unconquerable resolve,
without any dependence on others, without any of
these childish and mischievous party struggles, which
are perhaps a little more exciting than cricket, or
football, or even ' bridge ' to some of us, but a good
deal more profitless to the nation than digging holes
in the earth and then filling them up again, without any
use of force, without any oppression of each other,
without any of these blind reckless attempts to humiliate
and defeat those who hold different beliefs from our
selves, and who desire to follow different methods from
those which we follow, without any division of the
nation into two, three or more hostile camps, ever
inspired with dread and hatred of each other — it is only
you yourselves, fighting with the good, pure, honest
weapons of persuasion and example, of sympathy and
friendly co-operation — it is only you, calling out in
yourselves the great qualities, and flinging away all
the meaner things, the strifes, the hates, the jealousies,
the mere love of fighting and conquering — it is only
you, treading in the blessed path of peace and freedom,

A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM 87

who can bring about the true regeneration of society,
and with it the true happiness of your own lives.

And through it all avoid that favourite, that much
loved snare of the politician, by which he ever seeks
to rivet his hold upon you, refuse to attack and weaken
in any manner the full rights of property. You, who
are workers, could not inflict on your own selves
a more fatal injury. Property is the great and good
inducement that will call out your efforts and energies
for the remaking of the present form of society. Deprive
property of its full value and attractiveness, and we
shall all become stuff only fit to make the helpless
incapable crowd that the Socialist so deeply admires,
and hopes so easily to control. But it is not only for
the sake of the ' magic of property ', its power to call
out the qualities of industry and saving ; it is above all
because you cannot weaken the rights of property
without diminishing, without injuring that first and
greatest of all possessions — human liberty; it is for
that supreme reason that we must resist every attempt
of the politician to buy votes by generously giving
away the property that does not belong to him. The
control of his own property by the individual, and the
liberty of the individual can never be separated from
each other. They must stand, or fall, together.
Property, when earned, is the product of faculties, and
results from their free exercise; and, when inherited,
represents the full right of a man, free from all
imaginary and usurped control of others, to deal as
he likes with his own. Destroy the rights of property,
and you will also destroy both the material and the
moral foundations of liberty. To all men and women,
rich or poor, belong their own faculties, and as a con
sequence, equally belongs to them all that they can

88 A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM

honestly gain in free and open competition, through
the exercise of those faculties.

It is idle to talk of freedom, and, whilst the word is
on one's lips, to attack property. He who attacks
property, joins the camp of those who wish to keep
some men in subjection to the will of others. You
cannot break down any of the defences of liberty, you
cannot weaken liberty at any one point, without
weakening it at all points. Liberty means refusing to
allow some men to use the State to compel other men
to serve their interests or their opinions ; and at what
ever point we allow this servitude to exist, we weaken
or destroy in men's minds the sacredness of the
principle, which must be, as regards all actions, all
relations, our universal bond. But it is not only for the
sake of liberty — though that is far the greater and
higher reason — it is also for the sake of your own
material progress — that you, the workers, must resolutely
reject all interference with, all mutilations of the rights
of property.

For the moment the larger part of existing property
belongs to the richer classes ; but it will not be so, as
soon as ever you, the workers, take out of the hands
of the politicians, and into your own hands, the task of
carving out your own fortunes. The working body
of the people must no longer be content — not for
a single day— to be the property-less class. In every
city and town and village they must form their associa
tions for the gaining of property ; they must put their
irresistible pence and shillings together, so that, step by
step, effort upon effort, they may become the owners
of land, of farms, of houses, of shops, of mills, and
trading ships ; they must take shares in the great
well-managed trading companies and railways, until the

A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM 89

time comes, as their capital increases, when they will
be able to become the owners at first of small trading
concerns, established by themselves, and then later
of larger and more important concerns. They must —
for all reasons, the best and the second best — become
the owners of property. Without property no class
can take its true place in the nation. They must
devote much of their resolution and self-denial to the
steady persistent heaping together of the pence and
shillings for this purpose. As they become possessed
of property, they will see a definite goal lying before them
selves — one good and useful ambition ever succeeding
to another. The old dreary hopelessness will disappear,
they will gain in power and influence ; the difference
between classes will disappear ; they will break the
enfeebling and corrupting influence of the politicians
—what influence would remain to the man of words
if he could no longer offer gratis — in return for nothing
but votes — the property of others, without any greater
exertion on the part of the people than marking their
voting papers in his favour ? And with the acquiring
of property, the workers will also acquire the qualities
that the management of property brings with it ; whilst
they add a new interest, a new meaning to their lives.
We appeal to the many thousands of strong, capable,
self-denying men that are to be found among us. Is
the gaining of property only a dream; is the thing
so very difficult, so far out of your reach ? Say that
a million men and women begin to-morrow to subscribe
one halfpenny a week — who would miss that magical
halfpenny, which is to transform so many things? — at
the end of the year you will have a fund of over
£100,000 to start with — not we think, a bad beginning
for the great campaign. In many cases the property,

go A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM

such as land and houses, that you would so acquire,
you would probably rent or redistribute on remunerative
but easy terms to your own members; in the case of
workers in towns, you would be able to allow those
of your members who desired rest and change, to
work for a time on your farms, and you would also be
able to make a holiday ground and common meeting-
place of some farm that belonged to you, and that
could be easily reached by that true instrument of
social progress for men and women, the bicycle. Many
will be the new forms of health and comfort and
amusement that will become possible to you, when
once you steadily determine to pile the pence and the
shillings together for becoming owners of property;
and when once you have put your hand to this good
work, you must not relax your efforts until you have
become, as you will become before many years have
passed, the greatest of property holders in the nation.
All is possible to you if you resolutely fling away from
you the incitements to strife, the tamperings with
liberty and individual property, and pile up the pence
and the shillings for the acquiring of your own property.
Resist, therefore, all reckless, unthinking appeals made
to you to deprive the great prize of any part of its
attractions. If you surround property with State
restrictions, interfere with free trade and any part
of the open market, interfere with free contract, make
compulsory arrangements for tenant and landowner,
allow the present burdens of rate and tax to discourage
ownership and penalize improvements, you will weaken
the motives for acquiring property, and blunt the edge
of the most powerful material instrument that exists
for your own advancement. Only remember — as we
have said — that great as is your material interest in

A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM 91

safeguarding the rights of individual property, yet
higher and greater are and ever will be the moral
reasons that forbid our sanctioning any attack upon it,
or our suffering State burdens and restrictions and
impediments to grow round it. True liberty — as we
said — cannot exist apart from the full rights of property;
for property is — so to speak — only the crystallized form
of free faculties. They take the name of liberty in vain,
they do not understand its nature, who would allow the
State— or what goes by the name of the State— the
worthy eighteen or twenty men who govern us — to
play with property. Everything that is surrounded
with State restrictions, everything that is State-mutilated,
everything taxed and burdened, loses its best value,
and can no longer call out our energies and efforts in
their full force. Preserve, then, at its best and strongest
the magic of property ; leave to it all its stimulating
and transforming virtues, It is one of the great
master keys that open the door to all that in a material
sense you rightly and proudly wish to do and to be.

Many other points remain ; we can only touch here
on a few of them. Keep clear of both political parties,
until one of them seriously, earnestly, with deep
conviction, pledges itself to the cause of personal
liberty. At present they are both of them opportunist,
seeking power, rejecting fixed principles. It is true
that we owe great debts to the Liberal party in the
past, but at present it is deserting its own best tradi
tions, ceasing to guide and inspire the people, fighting
the downhill not the uphill battles, and intent on
playing the great game. Some day, as we may hope,
it may refind its better self and breathe again the spirit
of true exalted leadership, and regardless of its own
fortunes for the hours place itself openly on the side

92 A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM

of Mr. Spencer's 'widest possible Liberty'. But to-day
both parties mean anything or nothing ; they represent
only too often mere scrambling, mere lust for power.
It is true that one or other of the two parties may mean
to you some of the things that you yourselves mean, but
it will also mean a great many things that you do not
mean. They both believe in subjecting some men to
the will of other men, in using the State as the instru
ment of universal force, and you cannot rightly take
your place in their ranks, or fight with them. Have
nothing to do with the scramble for power. Hold on
your own course and stand 'foursquare to all the
winds '. Pick out your boldest and most resolute men,
and fight every by-election. Don't fight to win, but
fight to teach and inspire. The more resolutely you
stand on your own ground, the more men of both
parties, who begin to see the worthlessness and the
mischief of these party conflicts, and the growing
danger of using force, will come to you and join your
small army. Few as you are to-day, you are stronger
than the huge ill-assorted crowds — representing many
conflicting opinions — that stand opposed to you, for no
one can measure the strength that a great and true
cause, devotedly followed, gives to those who con
sistently serve it. Fight the battle of liberty at every
point. Give your best help to those who are resisting
municipal trading, or resisting interference with home
work, or resisting the placing of power in the hands of
the medical or any other profession. You must not
confer any form of authority or monopoly on any
profession; you must not give to any of them the
power to force their services upon us. Let every
profession that will, organize itself and make rules for
its own members ; but we, the public, must remain free

A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM 93

in every respect to take or to leave what they offer to
us. The monopolies that they all so dearly love are
fatal to their own efficiency, and to their own higher
qualities, as well as full of danger to the public. We
all lose our best perceptions, we all become intel
lectually hide-bound, we all begin to believe that the
public exist for us, exist for our professional purposes,
whenever we are protected by a monopoly. In the
same way never hand over any question to be decided
by those who are called experts. The knowledge of
the experts is very useful and valuable, but wisdom and
discernment and well balanced judgement are different
things from knowledge, and they do not always keep
company. Knowledge is great, some one has written,
but prejudice is greater. The experts are excellent as
advisers, but never as authoritative judges, allowed to
stand between the public and the questions that affect
its interest. The real service that the experts can
perform for us is to place their knowledge in the
clearest and simplest form before us all, and to explain
their reasons for advising a certain course. There is
no limit to the mistakes that the most learned men may
make when they are allowed to deliver judgement
behind closed doors, when they are not called upon to
submit their reasons to open discussion, and to justify
publicly the counsels that they offer.

Strive also to make this great Empire of ours an
instrument of help and usefulness and friendliness for
the whole world. It is a great world-trust placed in
our hands, that we must interpret in no selfish and
narrow, in no boastful and vainglorious spirit. Cast
away all the tawdry and sordid dreams of an Empire
stronger than all other nations ; but let it rest on the
one true foundation of peace and friendship, and as far

94 A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM

as lies with you of free intercourse between all nations —
an Empire of equal generous rights, with no privileges
reserved for any of us. So, and only so, shall this
great Empire endure, saved from the fate that has so
justly swept away all the other great Empires, that were
founded on meaner and more selfish conceptions.
Have nothing to do with this pitiful cowardly un-
English war against the aliens. Even if your interests
should seem to suffer for awhile— which there is strong
reason for believing would not be the case — we ask you
to make this sacrifice for the sake of the liberty of
all, even the poorest, and for the sake of the proud
traditions of our race. Unswerving, disinterested
devotion to the principle of universal liberty, and to
those noble traditions that have always opened the
gates of this country to the suffering and oppressed,
will far, far outbalance any hurt that may for a time
result from the presence with us of the suffering and
oppressed. Plead always that there should be no
unworthy exceptions; all such exceptions are bad in
themselves, and have the bad habit of becoming the
rule. The temper of timorous selfishness that would
exclude any aliens, that would treat any natives as
different from our own flesh and blood, is our real
danger— the danger that threatens our true greatness.
Indulge that temper in any one direction, and you will
presently encourage it to become the evil genius of the
nation.

Lastly, let us all work together, to soften and improve
the relations of capital and labour. War between
capital and labour is only too like the unreasonable and
disastrous war between nations, or between parties in
a nation. All war is a crime, and, as all crimes are,
a mischievous folly—in almost all cases a mere outburst

A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM 95

of childishness. Everywhere we have to learn the wise
art of pulling in friendly forbearing fashion with each
other, and not against each other ; everywhere we have
to learn to abandon the useless wasteful brutal methods
of war, and to enter the blessed and fruitful paths
of peace. Is there any war of any kind, that might not
have been avoided by better temper, more patience, and
a stronger love of peace ? Is there any war, excepting
on very rare occasions the wars to repel invasion or the
attacking of great human rights, that in the end has not
brought disappointment and sorrow, and bitter fruits of
its own, as much or even more to the nation that was
successful, as to the nation that was unsuccessful?
And who profits from these great labour contests, and
the stirring of hurtful passions, that goes with them ?
Friendship, friendly co-operation, the making of common
cause for common ends, are the true ends to be aimed
at between labour and capital ; and each contest makes
the good day of reconciliation more difficult, puts it
further and further from us. We cannot choose in this
great matter. There is only one way. We must be
friends. Nothing less than honest heartfelt friendship
will mend the old evils, and make the happier future.
As we asked, who profits by these contests ? If you —
the workers — win to-day, the capitalists organize them
selves to-morrow more strongly than before ; if the
capitalists win, the workers in the same way strengthen
their fighting forces. And so— just as between nations
— runs for ever the vicious circle. And as with the
nations, so our labour strife is not only lost and wasted,
but it fatally injures both sides alike — both the con
querors and the conquered. Let us then love and
honour peace, cling to her, open our hearts to her, make
sacrifices for her, bear and forbear for her sake, place

96 A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM

her great ends before everything else, and resolve that,
as far as lies with us, her happy reign shall at last
be established over the whole land. Peace — always
hand-in-hand with her great twin-sister liberty — not only
represents the higher meaning of our moral life, but
also like liberty represents the greatest material interest
that the workers have ; their industry and skill will never
bear their full fruits as long as we cling to war, and the
destructive methods of force. Capital and labour, like
the rest of us, must obey the great moral law and tread
in the path of peace and friendship. It is their duty, as
it is the duty of all of us in the other relations of life-
worthy of every effort, of all patience and sacrifice on
our part. Only with peace can the true prosperity
come. With peace and friendship, trade and enterprise
would develop a much more vigorous life, and find
for themselves many new directions. Nothing limits
enterprise so fatally, and with it the employment of the
workers, as the dissensions and quarrels between capital
and labour. With peace and friendship not only does
more and more capital flow into trade and production ;
but new enterprises are confidently undertaken in every
direction ; and then, as the consequence, wages rise
in the one true healthy manner— with the security that
peace brings, capital bidding against capital, and the
capitalist accepting lower profits. All insecurity, all
disturbance of trade relations, must be paid for, and
they are paid for by the worker; for insecurity and
uncertainty mean that a higher rate of profit is necessary
to tempt the investment of capital lying idle, and there
fore necessarily results in lower wages.

Reorganize then your trade societies on a peace
basis, or establish new unions on that basis. Preserve
your independence ; but do all in your power to enter

A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM 97

into friendly alliances with capital. Remember that
friendship is the triumph of good sense and wise
temper; strife is the indulgence of the undisciplined,
the childish part of our nature. Form associations in
which both the workers and the capitalists would be
represented ; where they would meet and take common
action, as friends, working together to make the
conditions of labour better, more comfortable, more
sanitary, and using every peace expedient to remove
difficulties as they arise. If times of depression come,
and wages fall low, use the common fund to draft away
some of the workers, find temporary employment for
them on the farms and lands that you will acquire as
your own, start workshops of your own, which in some
cases might provide articles of home use and comfort for
your members; and let your unemployed members in
turn receive a grant to enable them to spend their
unoccupied time usefully in study and education. At
present an unoccupied workman wastes time and temper
during a slack time. Like his own tools he rusts and
deteriorates with them. Why should that be so ?
Have your own classes and day schools, and let the
unoccupied men turn the time to golden use. But
through it all, even if you strike, refuse as a matter
of principle, as faithful followers of liberty in everything,
to use any of the old bad methods of force. If, after
every effort, after attempting mediation and arbitration,
you cannot agree about wages with the employers, and if
you think it wise and right and necessary to do so, throw
up your work ; but if there are those who will take the
wage that you are unwilling to take — let them do so, with
out let or hindrance. It is their right ; and we must never
deny or fight against a human right for the sake of what
seems to be our interest of the moment. We say what

H

98 A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM

' seems ' to be ; for in the end you will gain far more by
clinging faithfully to the methods of peace and respect
for the rights of others than by allowing yourselves
to use the force that always calls out force in reply,
always brings its own far-reaching hurtful consequences,
for the sake of the advantage or victory of the moment.
Once be tempted to use force, and force will become your
master, your tyrant, tempting you again and again to seek
its aid and to enter its service. No man employs force
to-day without being easily persuaded to use it once more
to-morrow, and then again the next day. There are in
all that we do only two ways — the way of peace and
co-operation, the way of force and strife. Can you
hesitate between them ? Do not good sense and right
sense plead for the one and against the other? Set
yourselves then to discover and practise every concili
atory method ; wherever practicable, become share-
owners and partners in the concerns where you labour,
and make it your pride to join hands frankly with the
employers, wiping out for ever the old disastrous war
feeling, that has brought so much useless suffering and
loss with it.

Remember, also, as another great and vital interest, to
keep a free and open market in everything. Only so
again can you get the fullest return of your labour.
High wages are of little profit, when prices rule high,
and production becomes a dull monopoly, benumbing
the best energies of the producers. Under a monopoly
we all grow stupid, unperceiving, apathetic, given up to
routine. Leave all traders free to bring to your door
the best articles that the world produces at the lowest
cost. If they are better and cheaper than what you
produce, they will be the truest incentive for greater
exertions both on your part and on the capitalist's part.

A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM 99

It is only the coward's policy to kneel down in the dust,
and wail, and confess inferiority, as regards the pro
ducers of other nations. Take up the challenge bravely,
from whatever quarter it comes ; improve method and
process and machinery — above all improve the relations
between capital and labour ; on that, more perhaps than
on anything else, industrial victory depends. Be
willing to learn from all, of any country, who have any
thing useful to teach. Never be tempted to build
Chinese walls for your protection, and to go indolently
to sleep behind them. Your system of free trade is
another great world-trust placed in your hands. You
stand before all nations holding a bright and shining
light, that if you are true to the great destiny of our
country you will never allow to be dimmed or ex
tinguished. Mr. Cobden spoke the truth when he said
that you would convert the other nations to your own
brave way of competition ; only he did not allow enough
for all the reactionary influences, the narrow unen
lightened so-called patriotism, the timidities of some
traders and their desire to take their ease comfortably,
and not to over-exert themselves, so long as they could
compel the public to buy at their own price, and to
accept their own standard of good workmanship, the
warlike Emperors, the Chauvinists of all countries, the
extravagant spendings with the resulting difficulties of
getting blood from a stone, and the temptation of
scraping revenue together in any mischievous fashion
that offered itself, the party intrigues, the effort to
discover something that would serve as an attractive
policy, the unavowed purpose of some politicians, living
for party, and keen for power, to bind a large part of the
people by the worst of bonds to their side by means of
a huge and corrupt money interest. But the con-

H 2

ioo A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM

sequences of protection are righting their battle every
where on the side of free trade — as the consequences of
folly and blindness always fight on the side of the better
things ; and if we remain faithful to our great trust will
in their due time fulfil Mr. Cobden's words. The high
prices and dear living, the harassing interferences with
trade, the rings and corners, the trickeries and corrup
tion, that all tread so close on the heels of protection,
the wild extravagance, the domineering insolent attitude
of the State-made monopolists, the ever-growing power
of the governments to go their own way, where they
can gather vast sums of money so easily through their
unseen tax collectors, the ever spreading Socialism,
that is only protection made universal — all these things
are preaching their eloquent lesson, and slowly prepar
ing the way in other countries for free trade. Sooner
or later the world after years of bitter experience learns
to unmask all the impostor systems that have traded on
its hopes and passions and fears. The thin coating
wears off, and the baser metal betrays itself underneath.
So it will fare with the Protection, that asks you to be
credulous enough to tie up your left hand in order that
your right hand may work more profitably. It is true
that in protected countries the wages of the workers
may be pushed up higher than in the case of free trade
countries, but life will remain harder and more difficult.
Why ? Because, as we have said, prices rule so high ;
corners and combinations flourish ; trickery and corrup
tion find their opportunity ; more vultures of every kind
flock to the feast ; and with the feast of the vultures the
burden of rates and taxes becomes intolerable. The
whole thing hangs together. Establish freedom and
open competition in everything, and all forms of trade
and enterprise, all relations of men to each other, tend

A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM 101

to become healthy and vigorous, pure and clean. The
better and more efficient forms— as they do throughout
nature's world — slowly displacing the inefficient forms.
It must be so ; for in the fair open fight the good always
tend to win over the bad, if only you restrain all
interferences of force. It is so with freedom every
where and in all things. Freedom begets the conflict ;
the conflict begets the good and helpful qualities ; and
the good and helpful qualities win their own victory.
They must do so ; for they are in themselves stronger,
more energetic, more efficient, than the forces — the
trickeries, the corruptions, the timidities, the selfishness
— to which they are opposed. The same truth rules
our good and bad habits. Only keep the field open and
allow the fair fight, and the bad at last must yield to the
good. Sooner or later the time comes when the clearer
sighted, the more rightly judging few denounce some
evil habit that exists ; gradually their influence and
example act on others in ever-widening circles, until
many men grow ashamed of what they have so long
done, and the habit is abandoned. Such is the uni
versal law of progress, which prevails in everything, so
long as we allow the free open fight between all good
and evil. But in order that the good may prevail there
must be life and vigour in the people, and this can only
be where freedom exists. If freedom does not exist, if
life and vigour have died, then protection — whatever its
form — cannot prevent, it can only put off for a short
time the inevitable ruin and disaster. Nations only
continue to exist as long as they keep in themselves the
great simple virtues. As we have seen again and again,
they go to pieces, and yield their places to others when
once the fatal corruption takes root in their character ;
corruption can only be fought by liberty with its

102 A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM

strengthening, raising, purifying influences. Protection,
that is artificial in its nature, protection that rests on
force, always means, if long enough continued, failure
and death in the end ; for it prevents our developing the
qualities which can alone enable us to keep our place in
a world that never stands still. As Mr. Darwin pointed
out so clearly those races of plants and animals which
for a time were protected by mountains or desert or an
arm of the sea, were doomed to fail when at last they
came into competition with the unprotected forms. So
is it with us men. If you wish to understand the deadly
influences of protection, if you wish for a practical
example, look carefully at all the distorted and perverted
growths of trade enterprise that exist in some protected
countries, the unwholesome combinations, the 'universal
selfish scramble, the poisonous mixture of politics and
trade influences, the use of the State power to watch
over and favour great moneyed monopolies, the long
endurance of the public that tolerates the vilest things at
the hands of its politicians, and you will realize how
deadly is every form of protection, that resting on force
sends us to sleep, and how vital is the liberty that for
ever fights the evil by opposing it to the good, that
never sleeps, that is always stirring us into new forms
of doing and resisting, and for ever tends to make the
better take the place of the good. There is only one
true form of protection, and that is universal liberty with
its ceaseless striving and effort.

Strongly as we are opposed to the Protectionists, who
whitewash their creed under the name of Tariff Reform,
it is fair to remember one plea on their behalf. They
have one true grievance. As long as the present ex
travagant spending goes on in its compulsory fashion
they may fairly complain that the income-tax payers are

A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM 103

likely to be unjustly treated. The remedy does not lie
in extending our compulsory system of taking from the
public but in limiting it, and presently transforming it
into voluntary giving. Under our compulsory system
free trade will never be a safe possession. It is with us
to-day ; it will be lost to-morrow. If we were pushed
again into a war, as we were pushed headlong into the
Boer War, just because one statesman got into a temper,
shut his eyes and put his head down, and another states
man looked sorrowfully on, like the gods of Olympus,
smiling at the follies of the human race, we should at
once hear the double cry ringing in our ears for conscrip
tion and protection — conscription to force us to fight with
our conscience or against our conscience ; protection to
force us to pay for what we might look on as a crime
and a folly. You may be sure that free trade will
sooner or later be swept away, unless we go boldly
forward in its own spirit and in its own direction and
destroy the compulsory character of taxation. There
lies the stronghold of all war and strife and oppression
of each other. As long as compulsory taxation lasts —
in other words giving power to some men to use other
men against their beliefs and their interests— liberty
will be but a mocking phrase. Between liberty and
compulsory taxation there is no possible reconciliation.
It is a struggle of life and death between the two.
That which is free and that which is bound can never
long keep company. Sooner or later one of the two
must prevail over the other. If a war came, conserva
tive ministers would see their great opportunity, and
with rapture of heart would fasten round us the two
chains that they dearly love, conscription and protection.
Liberal ministers would sorrowfully shake their heads,
wring their hands, utter a last pathetic tribute to liberty

104 A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM

and free trade, and with handkerchiefs to their eyes
would take the same course. If you mean to secure
the great victory just gained for free trade you must
go boldly and resolutely on in the same good path.
Dangers lie strewn around you on every side. There
is no security for what you have gained, but in pressing
forward. There is one and only one way of perma
nently saving free trade, and that is to sweep away all
the compulsory system in which we are entangled.

And now place before yourselves the picture of the
nation that not simply out of self-interest but for rights'
sake and conscience sake took to its heart the great
cause of true liberty, and was determined that all men
and women should be left free to guide themselves and
take charge of their own lives; that was determined
to oppress and persecute and restrain the actions of no
single person in order to serve any interest or any
opinion or any class advantage; that flung out of its
hands the bad instrument of force — using force only for
its one clear, simple and rightful purpose of restraining
all acts of force and fraud, committed by one citizen
against another, of safeguarding the lives, the actions,
the property of all, and thus making a fair open field for
all honest effort ; think, under the influences of liberty
and her twin-sister peace — for they are inseparably
bound together— neither existing without the other-
how our character as a people would grow nobler and
at the same time softer and more generous— think how
the old useless enmities and jealousies and strivings
would die out ; how the unscrupulous politician would
become a reformed character, hardly recognizing his
old self in his new and better self; how men of all
classes would learn to co-operate together for every
kind of good and useful purpose ; how, as the results of

A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM 105

this free co-operation, innumerable ties of friendship and
kindliness would spring up amongst us all of every
class and condition, when we no longer sought to
humble and crush each other, but invited all who were
willing to work freely with us; how much truer and
more real would be the campaign against the besetting
vices and weakness of our nature, when we sought to
change that nature, not simply to tie men's hands and
restrain external action, no longer setting up and estab
lishing in all parts of life that poor weak motive — the
fear of punishment — those clumsy useless penalties,
evaded and laughed at by the cunning, that have
never yet turned sinner into saint ; how we should re
discover in ourselves the good vigorous stuff that lies
hidden there, the power to plan, to dare and to do ; how
we should see in clearer light our duty towards other
nations, and fulfil more faithfully our great world-trust ;
how we should cease to be a people divided into three
or four quarrelsome unscrupulous factions — ready to
sacrifice all the great things to their intense desire for
power— and grow into a people really one in heart and
mind, because we frankly recognized the right to differ,
the right of each one to choose his own path because
we respected and cherished the will, the intelligence,
the free choice of others, as much as we respect and
cherish these things in ourselves, and were resolved
never to trample, for the sake of any plea, for any
motive, on the higher parts of human nature, resolved
that — come storm or sunshine — we would not falter in
our allegiance to liberty and her sister peace, that we
would do all, dare all and suffer all, if need be, for their
sake, then at last the regeneration of society would
begin, the real promised land, not the imaginary land
of vain and mocking desires, would be in sight.

io6 A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM

And now for the practical measures that we must set
before ourselves : —

(1) So far as force is concerned, we must use State
force only to protect ourselves against those who would
employ force or fraud ; using it to safeguard all public
and private property, and to repel if a real necessity
arises the foreign aggressor. We must employ force
simply as the servant of liberty, and under the strongest
conditions that liberty would impose upon it ; we must
refuse utterly and in everything to employ it so as to
deprive the innocent and unaggressive citizen of his
own will and self-guidance.

(2) We must place limits upon every form of com
pulsory taxation, until we are strong enough to destroy
it finally and completely; and to transform it into a
system of voluntary giving. Under that voluntary
system alone can a nation live in peace and friendship
and work together happily and profitably for common
ends. In voluntary taxation we shall find the one true
form of life-long education which will teach us to act
together, creating innumerable kindly ties between us
all which will call out all the truest and most generous
qualities of our best citizens, doubling and trebling their
energies, as they find themselves working for their own
beliefs and ideas, and no longer used as the mere tools
and creatures of others ; which will slowly bring under
the influence of the better citizens the selfish and the
indifferent, teaching them too to share in public move
ments, and common efforts; which will multiply those
differences of method, those experiments made from
new points of view— experiments, upon which all pro
gress depends, and replacing the great clumsy universal
systems which treat good and bad alike, which are mere
developments of the official mind, and escape entirely

A PLEA FOR VOLUNTARYISM 107

from the control of those in whose interest they are
supposed to exist; which will call into life again the
proud feeling of self-help and independence which
belongs to this nation of ours, and which the politician
has done so much to weaken and destroy.

The great choice lies before you. No nation stands
still. It must move in one direction or the other.
Either the State must grow in power, imposing new
burdens and compulsions, and the nation sink lower
and lower into a helpless quarrelling crowd, or the in
dividual must gain his own rightful freedom, become
master of himself, creature of none, confident in himself
and in his own qualities, confident in his power to plan
and to do, and determined to end this old-world, profit
less and worn-out system of restrictions and com
pulsions, which is not good or healthy even for the
children. Once we realize the waste and the folly of
striving against each other, once we feel in our hearts
that the worst use to which we can turn human energies
is gaining victories over each other, then we shall at
last begin in true earnest to turn the wilderness into
a garden, and to plant all the best and fairest of the
flowers where now only the nettles and the briars grow.

We wish it to be understood that we who sign this
paper are in agreement with its general spirit, reserving
our own judgement on special points.

OXFORD: HORACE HART

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